Dental Hygiene Curriculum and Core Competency Development: A Case Study of One Ontario College Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this convergent parallel mixed methods case study was to explore the dental hygiene curriculum at one Ontario College, referred to as DH College (pseudonym) to discover educator, student, and graduating student perceptions of teaching and learning strategies related to national core competency development. Dental hygiene programs across Canada use these entry-to-practice National Dental Hygiene Competencies to develop curricula. All full-time educators of the program were invited to participate in an online survey and interview. This study explored how participating educators (n=7) in the DH College program interpreted, integrated, and assessed student achievement of core national competencies in the classroom. Through document analysis the study explored how students (n=144) perceived learning experiences related to core competency development. And, through the use of an online survey, the study further explored how participating graduating students (n=20) self-assessed their abilities related to the core national competencies. The Capabilities Approach theoretical framework grounded this study. The conclusions drawn from the findings of this mixed methods case study suggest that the DH College curriculum supports the development of core national competencies which are: the dental hygienist as a professional, communicator and collaborator, critical thinker, advocate, and coordinator however, educators find it challenging to teach professionalism and advocacy in the classroom. Three of the seven educators interviewed felt that graduates are not attaining all of the 70 core ability-based outcomes at the level of national expectations. And, graduating students reported that they had gained no understanding or a less than a basic understanding from their program curriculum with respect to 21 (30%) of the 70 core national ability-based outcomes required for entry-to-practice into the profession. Furthermore, and most importantly, educators were not unanimous in their explicit understanding of what constituted basic attainment of the national ability-based outcomes. Though the findings are not generalizable beyond the case study program, an understanding of these findings has the potential to inform teaching and learning, policy, and practice, not just in the case study program, but other dental hygiene programs that seek to review their own programs with respect to the core National Dental Hygiene Competencies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".