Anatomy meets dentistry! : Linking anatomy and clinical practice in the preclinical dental curriculum

  • Background: Establishing a strong link early on between preclinical coursework and the clinical context is necessary for students to be able to recognize the practical relevance of the curriculum during their preclinical anatomical courses and to transfer knowledge more easily. Our objective was to enhance the clinical relevance of a preclinical anatomy course for second-year medical students of dentistry by implementing an interdisciplinary skills training course on "Palpation of the Head and Neck Muscles" and to measure the learning outcomes. Methods: For the curricular development of the expanded course module, Kern’s 6-step approach was applied including subjective evaluation. We used a peer-teaching format supported by an e-learning application. A randomized control study measured effects of the two components (skills training, e-module) on learning outcomes. Four learning methods were compared: (1) lecture, (2) lecture + e-module, (3) lecture + skills training, (4) lecture + skills training + e-module. An objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) was used to measure and compare learning outcomes. Results: The two-way variance analysis demonstrated that participation in the skills training had a statistically significant effect on the OSCE results (p = 0.0007). Students who participated in the skills training did better (φ 107.4 ± 14.4 points) than students who only attended the lecture (φ 88.8 ± 26.2 points). Students who used the e-module but did not attend the skills training earned a slightly but not significantly higher average number of points (φ 91.8 ± 31.3 points) than those who only attended the lecture. The learning outcomes of the skills training were again significantly increased when the training was combined with the e-module (φ 121.8 ± 21.8 points), thus making it the ideal method for achieving the learning objectives defined in this study. Conclusions: The "Palpation of the Head and Neck Muscles" interdisciplinary skills training course linking basic anatomical knowledge and clinical skills led to clearly improved learning outcomes for both, anatomical knowledge and clinical skills. The additional use of an e-learning tool (e-module) improved the learning effect.

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Author:Nicole Rafai, Martin Lemos, Lieven Nils Kennes, Ayichah Hawari, Susanne Gerhardt-SzépGND, Irmgard Classen-Linke
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-430183
URL:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5123369
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-016-0825-8
ISSN:1472-6920
Pubmed Id:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27887620
Parent Title (English):BMC medical education
Publisher:BioMed Central
Place of publication:London
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2017/03/09
Year of first Publication:2016
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2017/03/09
Tag:Anatomy; Clinical skills; Dentistry; E-learning; Interdisciplinarity; Learning outcomes; OSCE; Peer-teaching; Randomized controlled trial
Volume:16
Issue:1
Page Number:10
First Page:1
Last Page:10
Note:
© The Author(s). 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
HeBIS-PPN:450964957
Institutes:Medizin / Medizin
Dewey Decimal Classification:6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0