Designing and comparing psychometric properties of the checklist for clinical skills assessment of dental students in complete denture course and evaluation of raters’ and students’ satisfaction

Due to the very high importance of assessing the clinical performance of students, choosing the best assessment tool and method is one of the most important goals and tasks in medical education. The objective of this study was the development of a checklist for the assessment of dental students’ clinical skills in the clinical complete denture course. The second aim was to determine the validity and reliability of the checklist, and The third aim was the evaluation of raters’ and students’ satisfaction.

The checklist was developed in expert panel sessions, and the validity and reliability of the checklist were assessed with CVI (content validity index) test-retest and inter-rater reliability methods, respectively. Students (n=15) were evaluated with a developed checklist. At the end of the session, the satisfaction level of staff and students were assessed. The obtained information was reported descriptively with the expression of mean and standard deviation and in the form of relative and absolute frequencies.

The content validity index (CVI) of the checklist was 0.96. The reliability of the checklist confirmed with a high Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (>0.8) (between 0.82-0.97 ((P<0.05). The coefficient of agreement in inter-rater reliability was 0.99. Raters’ and students’ satisfaction earned a high percentage of satisfaction.

The designed checklist has the optimal features of a good students’ clinical performance assessment tool; it seems that using this checklist can be an excellent alternative method to a global rating scale to assess the clinical skills of dental students in the complete denture courses.