As part of their training, dental students take courses in orofacial pain and oral medicine, and then use their knowledge in treating patients. The center uses Questionmark™ Perception™ combined with content created in Adobe Captivate to test students' knowledge of the conditions they will be treating.

Each case provides graphic and video content about the patient's problems. Then students are given a series of pages with buttons to choose from. Each button represents additional diagnostic tests, diagnoses and treatment options, which students choose based on the patient's medical history and exam findings. Choosing the correct button leads to a positive score and a screen showing the findings of the diagnostic test and explaining why the answer is correct. Incorrect choices lead to a negative score and a page that explains why the choice is not appropriate. Each student’s final score is a cumulative score based on all of their choices.

Perception allows Clark to track how long each student takes to work through each case, and to confirm whether the student has looked at a given page in the case.

These virtual patient cases give the program control over which diseases each student encounters during training. Clark says that this is better than the usual method of student observation of practitioners, because it guarantees that students will see each of the common conditions and that students genuinely understand the treatment decisions that are made.

Clark is glad to have Perception to deliver the content and monitor the choices the students make in these virtual cases, because he believes they're the ideal tool for student learning. "Because cases are real patient cases that are moderately complex, students learn very quickly what they don't know -- and that they have a lot to learn before they will gain competence in this area," he says.