Journal of dental education
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This article presents the development and implementation of a wiki-based application for the delivery of educational content in dentistry. The Dental Procedure Education System (DPES) is a new web application that uses SharePoint to combine online collaborative authoring characteristic of wiki spaces with instructional video documentaries. Harnessing the wiki's versatility, DPES offers faculty members an avenue to develop an authoritative source of information for both students, through DPES Pro, and the public at large, through DPES Public. ⋯ An authoring protocol, with a clearly defined sequence of steps, was established in order to keep the production of the DPES procedures consistent and predictable. Initial, anecdotal user reports indicate that DPES is well received among dental students and faculty members. Expected outcomes and benefits of DPES use are discussed, and directions for research are proposed.
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Clinical dental faculty members' lack of scholarly activity not only impacts their ability to be promoted and retained in their institutions but limits the contributions they could make to clinical discovery. Contributing factors to this situation include the lack of purposeful mentoring and the widespread faculty shortages, which increase faculty workloads. One way to address this challenge is to develop and implement formal mentoring programs, endorsed by the dental school's administration, that use reward structures in which novice clinical faculty members are teamed with faculty members experienced in scholarly activity. ⋯ Preliminary data from this program suggest that this has been a successful plan for increasing the scholarly activity of the clinical teacher-scholar. Although not without limitations, this program may serve as a model for other schools to consider as they encourage their own clinical faculty members to undertake research initiatives. Similar programs at dental schools across the country can enhance discovery, research, and treatment by expanding the number of researchers who are addressing the public's oral and systemic health needs.
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The University of Minnesota School of Dentistry launched its new dental therapy program in September 2009 after the Minnesota state legislature had authorized the training and practice of a dental therapist in May of the same year. The creation of this mid-level dental provider is seen as a workforce solution to help address the problem of access to dental care experienced by some members of our society. However, there is a lack of consensus and even controversy in organized dentistry about dental therapy, one of the mid-level provider models. ⋯ There was a clear divide between the part-time faculty members, who practice outside the institution, and the full-time educators with regard to the role of dental therapists. However, there was an overall consensus that dental faculty members have a commitment and responsibility to educate future dental therapists regardless of their personal position. This is encouraging to dental therapy students, who can be assured that they will receive the education they need to prepare them to practice.
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Very few dental educators have formal pedagogical training, and the availability of degree-granting programs for dental educators is very limited. A joint D. D. ⋯ D. program, and one is enrolled. This article describes the details of both programs and discusses preliminary outcomes. The model described here may serve as an example for other dental schools that may choose to implement degree programs in education for dental educators.
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It is generally accepted that repetition of procedures is necessary to develop clinical skill in dentistry. Although there is a rich empirical research tradition in medicine establishing competency levels for new procedures, investigations of the shape of learning curves for clinical techniques are rare in dental education. Data were reviewed from three classes (n=465) of students at the University of the Pacific Arthur A. ⋯ No evidence was found that test case performance was affected by number of previous test cases, number of practice (ungraded) procedures previously completed, faculty ratings of technical skill in the discipline by quarter, faculty ratings of patient management and of clinical judgment competencies, overall clinical GPA, and performance on initial licensure examinations. The absence of a pattern showing that amount of prior experience improves clinical performance raises questions about the practice of setting "requirements" for graduation and challenges dental educators to better explain the presumed relationship between practice and performance and the validity of clinical evaluation of performance based exclusively on the objective technical quality of work samples. The literature on learning curves and on competency-based education offer alternative insights into what students are actually learning but schools are failing to measure in the clinical experience.