New Training Approach for Improving the Spatial Perception and Orientation Ability of Dentistry Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

The article: New Training Approach for Improving the Spatial Perception
and Orientation Ability of Dentistry Students" was decribed to assess whether training using the portable tool improves students’ fine motor skills, spatial perception and orientation and may predict success in preclinical prosthetics courses.

Punctuation and editorial errors in the text should be corrected.

Material and methods - add number of ethics committee

page 6 - Table 2. Correlations between prosthodontic final grade and motor tests performed at time T0. - skip to next page

The table with the list of abbreviations is missing,

To sum up, article can be accepted after minor revision.

 

 

 

Author Response

please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This study is extremely similar to one published in 2019 and performed by the exact same group (Lugassy D, Levanon Y, Shpack N, Levartovsky S, Pilo R, Brosh T. An interventional study for improving the manual dexterity of dentistry students. PLoS One. 2019 Feb 1;14(2):e0211639). The authors may argue that they “changed something here, and changed something there, showed also this thing here”, but no, the essence of the work is exactly the same and it does not bring any novelty. It seems only that the authors are trying to pull out one more paper.

Author Response

please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thanks for addressing my comments

Author Response

please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Finding adequate training methods for dental students as well as identifying predictors for student performance is a continuous task. In this context, the authors describe an interesting idea of adapting the well known Pegboard test to the dental field.

The authors in my opinion should address the following comments during revision:

1 There is a difference between inserting pins into prefabricated holes as compared to creating a tooth preparation with a certain convergence angle. Also, for the latter the operator has to have an idea in mind on how the abutment should look like

2 The authors should clearly specify how the prosthodontic performance was judged i.e. glance and grade approach or using a check list. To me, not using an objective test such as PrepCheck (authors mention this system in the introduction) is the greatest drawback of this study!

3 The standard deviations are quite big several times exceeding 50% of the mean value - in my opinion, this makes the PhantHome test questionable as a predictor of student performance

Author Response

please see the attachment 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The statistics is poorly explained and poorly presented.

First, the authors will have to explain why they used Kendall correlation instead of Spearman correlation.

Second, a “largest correlation” with a r-value of 0.379 is still a weak correlation. This is misleading.

Third, the authors need to show the odds ratio and the p-value for each and every of the independent values of the logistic regression analysis, not just one p-value (“A logistic regression analysis was conducted using the four independent variables found in the previous model. The results were significant (p = 0.005)”).

 

Moreover, this study is extremely similar to one published in 2019 and performed by the exact same group (Lugassy D, Levanon Y, Shpack N, Levartovsky S, Pilo R, Brosh T. An interventional study for improving the manual dexterity of dentistry students. PLoS One. 2019 Feb 1;14(2):e0211639). The authors may argue that they “changed something here, and changed something there, showed also this thing here”, but no, the essence of the work is exactly the same and it does not bring any novelty. It seems only that the authors are trying to pull out one more paper.

Author Response

please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

The article: 'New Training Approach for Improving the Spatial
Perception and Orientation Ability of Dentistry Students' raises
a very important issue. The aim of the current study was to assess whether training
using the portable tool improves students’ fine motor skills, spatial perception and orientation
and may predict success in preclinical prosthetics courses.

The ideas are easy to follow. The writing is well organized into sentences and paragraphs. 
The writers use a wide range of vocabulary and grammar, and use the language correctly.

Punctuation and editorial errors in the text should be corrected.

Please improve affiliation. If two authors have the same affiliation,
they should have one number.

Materials and methods should include the approval number of the ethics committee.

Page 3/4 - the figure should be together with the caption.
You have to standardize p value - write everything in lowercase

To sum up, this article should be accepted after corrections.
In table 2, p value should be written italics 

Author Response

please see attacment 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for addressing my previous comments

Reviewer 2 Report

The opinion about this work is the same. As expected (and I did comment this on my previous review) the authors argued that they “changed something here, and changed something there, showed also this thing here”, but no, the essence of the work is exactly the same and it does not bring any novelty in relation to the previous work of the same group of researchers.