Shahid Beheshti dental students' perspective on clinical course evaluation methods

Evaluation is an integral part of educational programs and undoubtedly conducting an appropriate evaluation for the clinical courses of the medical and dental students, who have the burden of training professional experts, can improve the quality of education. The study endeavors to examine the evaluations of clinical general dentistry courses from Shahid Beheshti University studentschr('39') view in the academic years2017-2018.

This descriptive-analytic study was carried out on all 10th and 11th semester students (totally 50 persons) of Shahid Beheshti dental school. The data-gathering tool was a self-made questionnaire and its collection method was fieldwork. After designing the three-option Likert questionnaire in three areas, its validity and reliability were confirmed and calculated. After collecting the questionnaires analytic tests of one-way ANOVA, Tukey and Kruskal-Wallis test, was done.

From the perspective of the target group, the OSCE evaluation method was intermediate to weak (0. 69 ± 0. 44), the method of evaluating course requirements was intermediate (0. 99 ± 0. 50) and the general quality of evaluation methods for clinical courses was moderate (1. 20 ± 0. 32). However, dissatisfaction in some cases, such as feedback, the appropriateness of the OSCE evaluation method for assessing clinical dentistry skills, and the use of similar benchmarks for scoring by faculty members was seen among the students.

According to the studentschr('39') viewpoint, which evaluated the overall evaluations of clinical courses as intermediate in general, it can be concluded that the methods for evaluating clinical courses and the quality of clinical assessments at Shahid Beheshti dentistry faculty needs to be revised.