Learning outcomes of a mobile application for dental infection control education

Purpose/objectives This study aimed to apply and verify the effectiveness of a mobile-based dental infection control education application to enable students majoring in dental hygiene to learning dental infection control education without time and space constraints. Methods This study used a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design to examine differences in learning outcomes between an experimental group that learned through the mobile application and a control group that learned with handouts. The Infection Prevention and Control Mobile Application (IPC App) and handouts were developed by referring to the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) guidelines for Infection Prevention and Control in Dental Settings. Both the experimental and control groups were guided to perform self-regulated learning, where they independently led and managed their learning for two weeks. The study was conducted at the D university college with 42 students from the second grade in the Department of Dental Hygiene from August to October 2021. Differences in knowledge, self-efficacy, and summative evaluation were analyzed using an independent sample t-test and repeated measures analysis of variance (p < 0.05). Results The findings confirmed that the experimental group who learned through the IPC mobile application had improved their knowledge and indicated a higher summative evaluation than the control group that learned via learning documents (p < 0.05). Conclusions Owing to the high accessibility and repeatability of the learning content, the mobile application recommended in this study may serve as an effective self-directed learning tool for students to gain knowledge on the standard precautions for dental infection control.