[Comparative studies on the teaching of oral pathology].

This is a self-assessment of teaching effectiveness for teacher, students and teaching-material as well. A curriculum of oral patholology was created and prepared as syllabus, lectures and audiovisual aids. In order to estimate and compare the eductional achievements of different systems, a series of written multiple choice questions were prepared. Only items with an index of discrimination of more than 0,25 were used. The average index was 0,5. The results of a short-term experimetn (1 hour) shows that a teaching sequence in the conventional lecture style was most effective in transmitting knowledge (72% of maximum), audiovisual aids rating second (63%), followed by individual homework study using printed material (48%). The differences were statistically significant in most experiments. In the second type of experiment (long-term-experiment) we registered the time the students spent with lectures over a period of six months. When permitted to chose between the different systems the students preferred the audiovisual method to the lectures. Individual testing of these students shows a positive correlation between knowledge acquired and time spent with the audiovisual machines.