Journal of dental education
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Resistance to change is expected, especially when change involves and impacts many stakeholders. During the past year, the Curriculum Committee at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine has been preparing the dental school for a major curricular revision of its predoctoral program. ⋯ In particular, it examines the results of a faculty survey that was used to shape the retreat and was developed to determine the faculty's perceived knowledge about instructional design, barriers to innovations in teaching, and the influence of student evaluations and evidence-based dentistry principles on faculty teaching. Having identified strengths and weaknesses and areas of concern among faculty members through the survey, the Curriculum Committee was able to prepare a retreat that addressed faculty needs while simultaneously advancing the movement towards curriculum reform.
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The purpose of this study was to identify the prevalence of academic integrity violations reported by a national sample of dental hygiene students as compared to general undergraduate students. This study also examined the influence of student variables such as gender, age, and level of education, along with honor codes and other contextual factors, on academic integrity. A total of 2,050 surveys were mailed to a random selection of the schools with dental hygiene degree programs in each of the twelve American Dental Hygienists' Association (ADHA) districts. ⋯ Approximately 53 percent were from associate programs and 47 percent from baccalaureate programs. Of those responding, 11.3 percent reported cheating during their dental hygiene program, and 30.2 percent were aware of someone cheating in their program. A comparison of academic violations for dental hygiene students to students in other undergraduate programs reveals that a smaller proportion of dental hygiene students report violations.
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Competency-based education (CBE) in dental hygiene education is intended to measure learned skills that prepare students to independently provide services for the public. A variety of standardized clinical assessment techniques (SCATs) are available to substantiate the competence of health care professionals, including, but not limited to, objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs), triple jump exams, standardized patients, and simulations. Standardized clinical examinations test students' abilities to treat diverse patients in a consistent, controlled setting. ⋯ Approximately 97 percent of the responding programs used observation-type assessments followed by case studies (90 percent), self-assessment (85 percent), and mock boards (75 percent), with SCATs being the least used. The majority of responding directors (74 percent) indicated an interest in learning more about these SCATs. A chi-square test identified no significant difference between the use of SCATs by associate and baccalaureate degree programs, with program location also being irrelevant.
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The study objective was to assess predoctoral dental students' experience with a caries risk assessment computer program in the pediatric dentistry clinic at Marquette University School of Dentistry. In 2005, spring semester sophomore dental students (class of 2008) were introduced to the caries risk assessment computer program "Cariogram." The students received a fifty-minute lecture on caries risk assessment and a demonstration on how to use Cariogram in the clinic. After two years of clinical exposure to Cariogram, sixty-six out of eighty senior dental students completed an anonymous eleven-item questionnaire on their experience with the tool. ⋯ The students reported that 60 percent of full-time and 33 percent of part-time faculty were knowledgeable about Cariogram use. A majority of the students felt that Cariogram was not easy to understand, and eighty-two percent of them reported that they would not be using Cariogram in their private offices. Future studies should explore reasons why students do not feel inclined to use Cariogram as a caries risk assessment tool in their private practices even after being exposed to the tool in dental school.
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Advances in information and communication technology continually offer innovations to assist faculty in their efforts to help students learn new information or develop new skills. However, faculty members are often hesitant to incorporate these innovations into their courses out of fear that these new methods may not provide the anticipated outcomes. Hence, students are often the subjects of educational trials to evaluate curriculum innovations by comparing a new teaching/learning method to traditional lecture-based instruction. ⋯ Students also responded to the statement "The atlas should be added to our school's VitalBook" (digital library of curriculum materials). The mean rankings for this statement, using the same 0-10 scale, were 5.15 for the D1s, 6.63 for the D2s, and 7.26 for the D3s. Based upon these findings, the course directors decided not to add this atlas to the students' electronic resources.