Evaluation of the education, experience and gender influence the shade matching quality

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of color education, gender and level of experience on shade matching quality.Material and Method: A study was simultaneously performed a total of 218 color normal participants. Among them, there were 200 dental students and 18 prosthodontic post-graduate students, 130 female and 88 male. A lecture on color and color matching in dentistry was given to half of the dental students. Post-graduate students accepted as educated. Toothguide Training Box (TTB) which is working with Toothguide Trainer (TT) software, was used by all participants to perform all the steps of training procedure and lastly final test was done by the TTB. The test task was to successively match 15 shade guide tabs with the corresponding shade guides. The shade matching score for each participant, which was given by the TT software, was computed as a sum of color differences (??E) between target tabs and selected tabs. Lower ?E scores and higher TT scores corresponded to better shade matching results and vice versa.The evaluation of the quantative data and comparison between groups were performed by Oneway Anova test, and Tukey HDS test was used for the group which causes discrepancy. Parameters showing normal distribution, Student's t test was used for comparisons between the two groups. Qualitative data were compared using Chi-square test. Significance p <0.05 level were evaluated.Results and Conclusion: All participants were evaluated in terms of experience and final exam results, the mean total scores of post-graduated students in prosthodontics were significantly higher than 1. and 2. class of dental students (p<0,01) and also the mean of ??E scores were significantly lower than 1. and 2. class of dental V students (p<0,01). There was no significant difference between other classes of students and post-graduate students (p>0,05).The mean total scores of the educated group was significantly higher then uneducated group (p<0,01) and the mean ??E scores of educated group was significantly lower than uneducated group (p<0,01). The number of corrects were significantly higher in educated group (p<0,01). The mistake number of hue in educated group was significantly higher than uneducated group (p<0,01), furthermore for uneducated group the mistake nuber of value and chroma was significantly higher than educated group (p<0,01).The mean of total score and the mean of ??E, there is no significant difference between genders (p>0,05). In addition, the mean of total score of educated females was significantly higher than uneducated females (p<0,01), and also the mean of ??E was significantly lower than uneducated females (p<0,01). However, the mean of total score and the mean of ??E between educated and uneducated males there is no significant difference (p>0,05).Key Words: Color, shade matching, gender, experience, Toothguide Training Box