Evaluation, Implementation and reassessment of the Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology course at the school of Dentistry, Tehran University of Medical Sciences

Today, one of the most important challenges in teaching oral and maxillofacial pathology is how to teach it to dental students. The purpose of this study was to review the implementation and evaluation of the Practical Pathology Curriculum in order to achieve the goals of applied pathology education for dental students.

First, a need assessment was conducted so that the view of students in the faculty of Tehran University of Medical Sciences who had completed the practical oral and maxillofacial pathology unit 2 during the last 2 years were collected using a questionnaire. Then, using the view of faculty members and considering the student opinions and reviewing the texts and similar experiences in other universities in the world, amendments were made to the course mentioned above. After the implementation of the modifications, we gathered the student’s view using the same questionnaire.

In the need assessment phase, 92 students (controls) and after the implementation of the modification, 62 students (cases) completed the questionnaire. A significant improvement in the assessment of students in some items such as their overall assessment of educational quality (p = 0. 008) and the mean score of the questionnaire (p = 0. 00) was observed. Regarding the students grades in the final exam, after the implementation of the modifications, a slight improvement was observed although this was not statistically significant (p = 0. 431).

The above mentioned modifications results an improvement in the overall satisfaction of students with the teaching quality of practical pathology course, although the average score of the final exam did not show a significant increase.