671 Medicine and medical education are constantly changing and improving. This is one of the attractions to working in healthcare and long may it continue. However, when a new medical treatment emerges, then this must be covered in curricula-possibly for both under-and postgraduates. Similarly, when an innovation in medical education occurs and is proved to be effective, then this innovation mu...

Intercultural competence is an important component of the doctor-patient relationship in the multicultural climate evolving in the United States. We hypothesized that 1) exposure to racial and ethnic diversity in the student body, faculty, staff, and patient population in dental school and 2) a dental school curriculum that includes presentations on issues concerning racial and ethnic diversity...

The incorporation of web-based learning into the dental curriculum has been consistently recommended in the literature on reform in dental education. There has been growing support for web-based learning in dental and dental hygiene education as demonstrated by deans' identifying this as a planned curricular innovation. The purpose of our study was to explore characteristics of e-courses that m...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which U.S. dental hygiene programs are incorporating cultural competency education into the dental hygiene curriculum and to identify associated program characteristics. METHODS A 19 item survey was electronically administered to all 334 U.S. dental hygiene program directors. The questionnaire solicited information on teaching a...

Managing the change from traditional to problem-based learning (PBL) curricula is complex because PBL employs problem cases as the vehicle for learning. Each problem case covers a wide range of different learning issues across many disciplines and is coordinated by different facilitators drawn from the school's multidisciplinary pool. The objective of this project was to adapt an interactive co...

This paper reports on the pilot phase of a phenomenographic study which explores the relationship between teachers' and students' perceptions of the curriculum and theory of threshold concepts, which claims that there are concepts in all disciplines which must be understood, if learners are to progress to a more advanced level of understanding. It is suggested that threshold concepts may repres...

In response to current and projected demographic changes in the United States, many dental schools have taken steps to increase the cultural competence of their students through various educational methods. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the cultural competency curriculum at Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine (GSDM). The curriculum was evalu...

Reports of oral health disparities among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic sectors of the U.S. population have hastened development of strategies to address this issue. Among these strategies is revising dental school curricula in order to develop more culturally competent graduates. The present study uses data from the 2003 American Dental Education Association (ADEA) survey of dental school s...

Academic dental institutions face the growing challenge of securing the resources needed to develop a curriculum that incorporates current innovation and technology to ensure that students' learning experiences are relevant to current dental practice. As a result, university-industry relationships are becoming increasingly common in academe. While these relationships facilitate curriculum relev...

The aim of the present study was to evaluate two dental curricula at a school of dentistry in southern Brazil. The study population included dentists trained in the last two classes of the institution's old curriculum (n = 98) and graduates of the first two classes of the new curriculum (n = 56). A questionnaire with open and closed questions was used for an overall evaluation of different aspe...