Guiding Dental Student Learning and Assessing Performance in Critical Thinking With Analysis of Emerging Strategies

Abstract

Patient-centered care involves an inseparable set of knowledge, abilities, and professional traits on the part of the health care provider. For practical reasons, health professions education is segmented into disciplines or domains like knowledge, technical skills, and critical thinking, and the culture of dental education is weighted toward knowledge and technical skills. Critical thinking, however, has become a growing presence in dental curricula. To guide student learning and assess performance in critical thinking, guidelines have been developed over the past several decades in the educational literature. Prominent among these guidelines are the following: engage the student in multiple situations/exercises relecting critical thinking; for each exercise, emulate the intended activity for validity; gain agreement of faculty members across disciplines and curriculum years on the learning construct, application, and performance assessment protocol for reliability; and use the same instrument to guide learning and assess performance. The purposes of this article are 1) to offer a set of concepts from the education literature potentially helpful to guide program design or corroborate existing programs in dental education; 2) to offer an implementation model consolidating these concepts as a guide for program design and execution; 3) to cite speciic examples of exercises and programs in critical thinking in the dental education literature analyzed against these concepts; and 4) to discuss opportunities and challenges in guiding student learning and assessing performance in critical thinking for dentistry.

Evaluation of second year dental students’ perceptions on preclinical prosthodontic program

“…Performance assessment of students should be conducted in order to guide their learning 12 . There are various methods to measure student performance one of which is selfassessment recommended by educators 13 , because students should have a realistic sense of their own strengths and weakness 14 .…”

Two critical thinking models—probing questions and conceptualization—adding 4 skillsets to the teacher's armamentarium

“…The education literature has concepts that can be applied to dental faculty. [17][18][19] A general concept is that the more critical thinking experiences the student has, the more readily they adapt to the next one. Education literature concepts have led to an emerging concept in critical thinking outcomes: to emulate the thought process of the expert 4,20 by deriving key aspects of the expert's thoughts succinctly enough for application by the novice or advanced beginner to the next patient or situation.…”

“…The more direct the emulation the greater the validity. [17][18][19] Critical thinking skill sets thus far reported call on the student to ask probing and penetrating questions. The thought process is the outcome, learning guide, and assessment instrument for previously reported critical thinking skillsets.…”

Pensamento crítico e a formação de profissionais em Odontologia: uma revisão narrativa da literatura

“…preendê-lo, além de facilitar o desempenho profissional diferenciado 13 . Autores 4 identificaram a necessidade de implementar novas metodologias para ensinar aos alunos as habilidades de pensar criticamente e desenvolveram uma estratégia experimental adotando o mapa conceitual como instrumento para estimular o desenvolvimento do pensamento crítico.…”

“…É importante entender que não existe uma única forma de praticar ações, ou um jeito correto de intervir em uma situação. Por outro lado, é fundamental para o profissional em saúde, ser despertado e ensinado, para que ao exercer o cuidado centrado no paciente, consiga dominar, além das habilidades técnicas e conhecimento, o pensamento crítico 13 .…”