Journal of dental education
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An increasing proportion of the population is medically compromised. Dental and medical staff need to communicate and cooperate to afford these patients the best possible health care. ⋯ In contrast, most medical students thought both their knowledge and training in medical problems in dentistry to be only poor to moderate. Dental students rated the importance of medical problems in dentistry higher than did medical students.
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This article was developed for the Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education (CCI), established by the American Dental Education Association. CCI was created because numerous organizations within organized dentistry and the educational community have initiated studies or proposed modifications to the process of dental education, often working to achieve positive and desirable goals but without coordination or communication. ⋯ One of the objectives of the CCI is to provide guidance to dental schools related to curriculum design. In pursuit of that objective, this article summarizes the evidence related to this question: What are educational best practices for helping dental students acquire the capacity to function as an entry-level general dentist or to be a better candidate to begin advanced studies? Three issues are addressed, with special emphasis on the third: 1) What constitutes expertise, and when does an individual become an expert? 2) What are the differences between novice and expert thinking? and 3) What educational best practices can help our students acquire mental capacities associated with expert function, including critical thinking and self-directed learning? The purpose of this review is to provide a benchmark that faculty and academic planners can use to assess the degree to which their curricula include learning experiences associated with development of problem-solving, critical thinking, self-directed learning, and other cognitive skills necessary for dental school graduates to ultimately become expert performers as they develop professionally in the years after graduation.
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This article introduces a series of white papers developed by the ADEA Commission on Change and Innovation (CCI) to explore the case for change in dental education. This preamble to the series argues that there is a compelling need for rethinking the approach to dental education in the United States. Three issues facing dental education are explored: 1) the challenging financial environment of higher education, making dental schools very expensive and tuition-intensive for universities to operate and producing high debt levels for students that limit access to education and restrict career choices; 2) the profession's apparent loss of vision for taking care of the oral health needs of all components of society and the resultant potential for marginalization of dentistry as a specialized health care service available only to the affluent; and 3) the nature of dental school education itself, which has been described as convoluted, expensive, and often deeply dissatisfying to its students.
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While many factors contribute to lack of access to dental care along racial and ethnic lines, one of the most prominent factors is a lack of diversity among oral health professionals. Surveys and studies show that individuals in minority communities are more likely to seek treatment from people of their own racial or ethnic background and, in turn, that those caregivers are more likely to work in minority communities and have a desire to provide care to the underserved. ⋯ Admissions committees need to reanalyze standard admissions criteria to achieve the goal of building a diverse student body that is representative of the ethnic and cultural diversity of our nation. Increasing the diversity of our schools enhances the educational experience and increases the likelihood that dental school graduates will practice in ways that extend oral care services to all segments of society.
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Large curricular changes associated with changes in teaching and learning methods should be accompanied by faculty development programs linked to the new pedagogy. This article describes a framework for the development and implementation of a program designed to assist faculty with the transition of the dental curriculum to a problem-based learning (PBL) pedagogy. A faculty committee created a PBL core skills program based on experiential, developmentally appropriate approaches that resulted in constructive and social learning opportunities for the faculty participants. ⋯ D. S. curriculum as small-group, inquiry-based learning facilitators. Faculty development programs geared toward acquisition of specific teaching skills and based on adult learning principles can be devised locally and result in increased participation in a new curriculum.