The aim of this study was to evaluate dental students' opinions regarding the utilization of a new grading software program for student self-assessment and a faculty-grading tool in a preclinical course. Using surface mapping technology, this program, called E4D Compare, yields a digital model of a student's preparation that is color-coded to show deicient areas. The program has now been used for two years at the James B. Edwards College of Dental Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, and the students previously assessed with E4D Compare have now entered into the dental clinics. For this study, students were asked to complete an anonymous survey for the investigators to evaluate students' attitudes and opinions on the effectiveness of this software in their preclinical courses to determine if this type of feedback helped them develop clinical skills. The survey also sought to collect students' opinions on the traditional objective criteria-based grading system. The survey was distributed to all members of the Classes of 2014 and 2015; it yielded a 59 percent response rate for the two classes, with a total of eighty-one students responding. Overall, the majority of students preferred the E4D Compare grading system over traditional hand-grading methods. The grading system provided instant, objective, and visual feedback that allowed students to easily see where their deiciencies were and encouraged them to work towards an ideal inal product.
Interprofessional education (IPE) is a widely recognized and critical component of dental and health professions education and is included in two of the predoctoral education standards required by the Commission on Dental Accreditation (CODA). Following a review of the literature on the state of IPE education in U.S. dental education programs, this article revisits six institutions identified in previous research as exemplars successfully implementing IPE on their campuses. Interviews were conducted with leaders at the following programs: Columbia University, Medical University of South Carolina, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, University of Florida, University of Minnesota, and Western University of Health Sciences. Strengths and weakness of IPE in dental education are discussed, along with opportunities for the future including reducing barriers to scheduling, increasing intraprofessional education, and consistent outcomes assessment. The article concludes with lessons learned by administrators and suggestions for improving incorporation of these requirements into predoctoral dental education programs by emphasizing the importance of IPE and dentistry's role in overall health. This article was written as part of the project "Advancing Dental Education in the 21 Century."
The analysis of dental students' clinical production/participation has been used to assess whether a prospective graduate is capable of unsupervised and independent practice (that is, competent to perform that practice). This method and others have inherent biases that may not accurately reflect whether the student has mastered the associated concepts and techniques required for dentistry. The aim of this study was to assess an informatics system that assigned curriculum meta-tags with time-based relative educational value units (ReVUs) to each clinical procedure performed by Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) students. The system has been used since 1998, but for this study the complete data sets for the MUSC graduating classes of 2007 through 2016 were mapped using microcompetency codes for the dental procedures. In total, 421,494 procedures were formatted and analyzed using software developed to aggregate disparate data sets from clinical activities into a common format for evaluation. The results showed that the ten classes (cohorts) were very consistent with cohort high ReVUs averaging 7,317.1 points, cohort mean ReVUs being 5,180.2 points, and cohort low ReVUs averaging 3,381 points. A detailed analysis of student effort by dental subspecialty found that preventive activities represented 13.4%, patient assessment 32.6%, periodontology 2.8%, restorative dentistry 16.3%, prosthodontics 21.9%, endodontics 6.7%, and oral surgery 5.7% of the total points in the clinical part of the curriculum. In this system, point thresholds can be easily generated to monitor students' progress towards competence for each defined competency and thus assess their progress towards acquiring the skills required for unsupervised, independent practice.
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