How Do U.S. and Canadian Dental Schools Teach Interpersonal Communication Skills?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The status of instruction in interpersonal communication was surveyed in forty U.S and Canadian dental schools. Key faculty members were identified, and syllabi and course descriptions were collected and content-analyzed. The following findings were obtained for responding schools: 1) only one-third of schools had courses specifically focusing on interpersonal communication; 2) more than half of the schools offered these types of courses only during the first two years; 3) the most common topics were communication skills, patient interviewing, and patient education/consultation; 4) the most frequently used method of teaching was lectures; active practice was used less often; 5) written examination was the primary instructional evaluation tool, whereas more sophisticated performance-oriented assessments were used less often; and 6) about half of the teachers did not have a D.D.S. degree; those not dentists were primarily psychologists. At least eight of the forty dental schools surveyed do not appear to meet the accreditation guidelines for predoctoral programs in this area of instruction. Some could not identify a faculty member responsible for such instruction. Schools offering more extensive instruction were more likely to offer active rather than passive teaching and use more sophisticated student evaluation strategies. This research suggests a need for reevaluation of teaching in this subject area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".