Dental hygiene student attitudes about benefits of baccalaureate degree and factors impacting entry‐level program choice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES: Although the bachelor's degree is the entry-level degree option supported by the American Dental Hygienists' Association, the majority of dental hygiene programs remain associate degree. The aim of this study was to explore factors impacting entry-level program choice and examine attitudes and perceptions of dental hygiene students pertaining to a bachelor's degree (BS) as the entry-level degree. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey research design was utilized with a convenience sample of dental hygiene students (n = 429) from the United States and Canada. The 33-item survey had four sections: demographics, factors influencing program choice, attitudes, and perceptions of a BS. Descriptive and inferential analysis was used to explore the relationship between variables. RESULTS: The completion rate was 91% (n = 384). Factors that most influenced program choice included: location (74%), cost (68%), and time to completion (47.7%). Students with mothers who graduated from college were more likely to rank time to completion as their number one factor (37%) (χ2[df2] = 19.6, p < 0.001, phi = 0.33). Students in bachelor's programs were significantly more likely to believe a bachelor's degree better prepared clinicians for duties required in future practice and that the entry-level degree should be raised to a bachelor's degree (p < 0.001). While more students in associate degree program agreed there were opportunities in education without a bachelor's degree (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Cost, time to completion, and location were the factors influencing students' program choice. While the dental hygiene profession advocates raising the entry-level degree to a bachelor's programs, less than 40% of dental hygiene students supported this change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".