A Comparison of the Student's and Teacher's Viewpoints about the Characteristics of a Good Teacher in Dentistry

Teachers play an important role in an educational system. According to the importance of this subject in education quality improvement, the purpose of the present study was to compare the students’ and teachers’ viewpoints about the characteristics of a good teacher in dentistry. In the first step, an open- close questionnaire was prepared based on a ten person focus group discussion by the students composed of teachers’ characteristics in theoretical and clinical courses and evaluation. The questionnaire was based on four point Lickert scale and was presented to 100 clinical students and teachers of Mashhad dental school after reliability proof process in a Test retest evaluation. The data were analyzed by SPSS software. (α=0.05) In the first part, teachers’ and students’ most important choice was" teachers’ ability to integrate basic and clinical concepts" with the mean of 3.58 and 3.54 respectively. In the second part," discuss about the students’ concept in treatment plan" was the most important factor among teachers and students with the mean of 3.63 and 3.29 respectively and in the third part," evaluation designing based on a general dentist needs" was the most important factor among teachers and students with the mean of 3.02 and 3.32 respectively. The viewpoints of teachers and students were the same except for the level of importance of four subjects (teachers attending in classroom on time, paying more attention to patient management, introducing a hand out in courses and giving high lesson scores to all students) The results of the present study showed that the viewpoints of the students and teachers of Mashhad dental school about the characteristics of qualified teaching were the same in most of the subjects.