Design and evaluation of Antibiotic Prophylaxis in Web-baseddental continuing education course based on the constructivist

This study aimed at design and evaluation of web-based continuingeducation for physicians based on constructivist theory in MashhadUniversity of Medical Sciences during the summer of 2012. Researchpopulation included 30 continuing education courses and the sampleAntibiotic Prophylaxis course was randomly selected. All generaldentists registering (40 dentists) in the course during the summer of2012. By using the table of random digits, they divided into 2 groupseach with 20 ones, one as the control group and the other as theexperiment group. The study method was experiment. The independentvariable was the instructional design pattern based on constructivisttheory and the dependent variables included satisfaction, attitude andlearning rate. For estimating satisfaction and attitude, a researchermade questionnaire was used for evaluating satisfaction. The reliabilityof the questionnaire was α=.93. Karami's (2007) scale with thereliability of α= .92 was applied for evaluating attitude. A teacher-madepre-test post-test with kuder-richardson reliability of .80 was used forevaluating learning rate. The validity of these questionnaires and testwere confirmed by some specialists. Data was analyzed by usingdescriptive statistics and inferential statistics (MANOVA andANCOVA). Results showed that the participants' mean scores in allsatisfaction components and all attitude components were significantlyhigher in experiment group than control one. This was true in the caseof learning rate. Then experiment group had more satisfaction, morepositive attitude and higher learning rate than control group. It can beconcluded that applying the constructivist theory for web-basedlearning environments in physicians' continuing education makes theseenvironments more effective due to its compatibility with theconstructivist principles.