Hsingchi von Bergmann

Objective: To investigate the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the dental education, preparedness and productivity of Canadian dental students in two schools. Methods: Research data was collected via three primary methods. The first was through the Student Oriented Learning Online (SOLO) Survey. Survey responses from third and fourth year dental undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia and University of Toronto were compiled and analyzed. Secondly, clinical procedural productivity data was collected from the University of British Columbia Faculty of Dentistry for the dental student cohorts of 2016-2025 and analyzed. Lastly, data was collected from semi-structured interviews with dental students at both of the aforementioned universities. Analysis of the interview data revealed important themes. Results: From the SOLO survey data, it was found that UBC students showed higher scores for all six studied outcomes in comparison to UofT students. No significant differences were found among UBC respondents between Terms 1 and 2, but for UofT students two of the six outcomes were significantly decreased in Term 2 compared to Term 1. From the clinical procedural productivity data, it was found that there was a significant decrease in the number of procedures completed by the Classes of 2020 and 2021. Lastly, from the semi structured interviews, six overall themes were identified as to how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted these Canadian dental students.Conclusions: The two Canadian dental schools’ students felt that the COVID-19 pandemic had a significantly negative impact on their dental education and level of preparedness. The pandemic and related restrictions resulted in a decline of the number of clinical procedures completed by dental students. This study sheds light on various clinical preparation questions dental educators should consider.

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Entry to Practice Competencies and Standards is a document that sets the guidelines of curriculum for all Canadian dental hygiene programs. Within the document, a competency-based curricular aim is emphasized. As contemporary educational literature have been suggesting, student centered learning has become a dominant guiding principle of pedagogical approaches for competency-based education. With shifting curricular aims and pedagogical principles many current educators of dental hygiene programs may be teaching new curricula different to that which they experienced when they were students in dental hygiene programs. Furthermore, many of them may be expected to implement pedagogical approaches that are different from how they were taught due to traditional conceptions of how people learn. This study explores the perspectives on teaching and learning held by clinical dental hygiene instructors at one Canadian institution. The objective is to understand which teaching and learning perspectives dental hygiene instructors hold. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with fifteen instructors. The results show that instructors tend to think of their teaching as student-centered, yet in a set of 'simulated teaching' questions, the responses were found to be teacher-centered. The research also revealed that the process by which one learns to become a clinical dental hygiene instructor is multifactorial. These factors include but are not limited to the following: instructors' perceptions of their own learning experiences, instructors' experiences of inter- instructor collaboration, and instructors' methods of facilitating student self-efficacy. Given curricular change and the emergence of literature supporting a student-centered approach to teaching and learning, this study shows that it is critical to uncover the teaching/learning beliefs of the instructor's prior to designing faculty development programs. Integrating instructors'preconceptions into the program design may create an environment that is more accommodating of the transition towards the new pedagogical culture.

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