engleski

Quality evaluation – guaranteed success in dental education: Forensic dentistry

Aims. The addition of a new mandatory course into the dental undergraduate course load represents a special challenge since students often view new courses as an excess burden, and they are not usually motivated to follow them. Forensic dentistry is one of the most recently added mandatory courses in the dental undergraduate program offered at the University of Zagreb School of Dental Medicine. The purpose of this research was to establish the students’ satisfaction with this course, and to find out which of its segments they find the most interesting. Materials and methods. Random anonymous polling was conducted over a 7- year period (1989-2005), covering 246 final year dental students. The questionnaire contained 5 questions with “ yes” and “ no” answers and provided space for hand-written suggestions. Results. 86% of the polled students deemed the course essential to the education preparing them to be doctors of dental medicine. 96% of the students stated that they were satisfied with the quality of the lectures and the practical segments of the course. 16% of them maintained that the class time spent on the course should be longer. The most interesting part of the class pertained to identifying corpses (72%), bite mark identification (14%), and legal aspects (14%). 33% gave their own suggestions as to course improvement, most of whom expressed the wish for more hours of class time, and greater access to course material on the dental school’ s official webpages. The students commended the idea of monitoring student satisfaction with the quality of the course. Conclusion. Participating students accepted the quality evaluation questionnaire as a positive experience and as validation of their opinions. The students’ suggestions present us with simple and reliable guidelines for course improvement for certain classes. Student polling should be introduced for all courses, since the quality evaluation process leads us to success in dental education.

Dental education

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