Journal of dental education
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Many North American dental schools face the challenge of replacing the majority of their "boomer generation" clinical instructors over the next ten years as this cohort of faculty reaches retirement age. Developing a new cadre of clinical instructors poses a substantial faculty development challenge: what instructional techniques should be integrated into routine educational practice by the dental faculty of the future, and what aspects of the clinical learning environment should be addressed to improve the overall quality of the experience for patients, students, and the new cohort of instructors? To gain insight that might guide faculty development for new clinical instructors and enhance understanding of the learning environment in dental school clinics, this study addressed the following question: what are dental students' perceptions of their learning experiences in the clinical setting? The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the clinical instruction from the perspectives of the actual "consumer" of dental education: the student. This consumers' perspective was provided by 655 junior, senior, and graduate dental students at twenty-one North American dental schools who completed the Clinical Education Instructional Quality Questionnaire (ClinEd IQ) in 2003-04. ⋯ Analysis of more than 1,000 written comments provided by these students indicated four areas of concern: 1) inconsistent and sometimes insensitive (patronizing, rude) feedback from faculty; 2) excessive amounts of noneducational "legwork" such as billing, patient scheduling, phone calling, completing paperwork, and performing other clinic operations tasks; 3) limited access to faculty because of insufficient numbers of instructors on the clinic floor or difficulty locating faculty when they were needed for coaching, work evaluation, and chart signatures; and 4) concerns about the strategies employed to meet procedural requirements that some students saw as ethically questionable. Junior, senior, and graduate dental students at twenty-one North American dental schools perceived that the strongest aspect of their clinical education was their relationship with the faculty, but also reported that the dental school clinic was often an inefficient learning environment that hindered their opportunity to develop clinical competency. Students also sensed that faculty shortages, a growing crisis for dental education, hindered their progress in the clinic and made learning less efficient.