Dental Quality Improvement

Every dental professional has sat through lectures – many, many, lectures. Didactic teaching has its place, but dental practice is intensely practical. A new paper from academics in India trialled a new way of supporting learning, and compared the knowledge gained by experience of error to learning from lectures.

The study evaluated the effectiveness of teaching on Atraumatic restorative treatment (ART) for final year dental undergraduates. The students were allocated either to lectures as usual, or to case-based learning in small groups, using Mistake-Driven Learning (MDL).

Thankfully for patient safety, this did not require the students to make their own errors. The lecture group attended a fifty minute lecture, delivered as normal, including a PowerPoint presentation and with time for questions. The Mistake-Driven Learning group had the same teaching time. After a ten minute introduction on the technique, the students broke into smaller groups which reviewed four case studies, each of which included errors or misplaced steps. The students identified and discussed the errors, and then fed back to the large group on what they had found.

In the evaluation, both groups had the same baseline knowledge. After the intervention, the MDL group scored higher on factual knowledge, and retained more knowledge than the lecture group four weeks later. Perhaps unsurprisingly given most dentist’s interest in practice, the student feedback was better for the MDL group.

This method will not be appropriate for all topics and makes more demands on lecturers and tutors, but sounds more interesting to deliver than a traditional lecture. Looking at the study in a wider context, this raises questions of how to allow dental teams to learn from error outside this controlled undergraduate situation.

Most dental teams are small, and as dental services are often individual businesses, there tends to be limited sharing of information on problems and errors. In the UK, Defence Unions – non-UK readers can think of them as similar to insurance companies – do their best to share information learned from errors, and most teams will discuss problems that occur in their practice. Despite this the opportunity for structured learning is limited. This Indian paper should prompt us to think how Mistake-Driven Learning can be incorporated into postgraduate learning.

Reference

Varghese, Anu Sara; Sankeshwari, Roopali M.; Ankola, Anil V.; Santhosh, Varkey Nadakkavukaran; Chavan, Prajakta; Hampiholi, Vinuta; Khot, Atrey J. Pai; Shah, Mehul A. (2024) Effectiveness of error-based active learning compared to conventional lecture-based method among undergraduate dental students: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Education and Health Promotion 13 (1): 268, DOI: 10.4103/jehp.jehp_1154_23

Image by 정수 이 from Pixabay