Motivations for and outcomes of graduate education amongst dental hygienists: A pan‐Canadian study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Motivations and career outcomes of dental hygienists with baccalaureate degrees have been recently reported; however, few studies have explored Canadian dental hygienists pursuing graduate education. There is limited evidence to inform career outcomes and motivating factors for advanced education, limiting knowledge of how professional outcomes have evolved alongside advancements in graduate program offerings. This study focused on understanding motivating factors to pursue graduate education and the professional outcomes of dental hygienists with graduate degrees. METHODS: This nested online anonymous survey was conducted between November and December 2021 with dental hygienists who graduated from one of four Canadian baccalaureate-level dental hygiene degree programs and had further indicated that they were pursuing or had obtained additional graduate-level education (n = 60). Participants were asked to report on any advanced graduate-level education. Open-ended questions on graduate degree education were analysed through thematic analysis. RESULTS: Motivations for pursuing graduate degrees were influenced by personal and professional preferences. Master's degree recipients cited expanded career opportunities, alternate interests, convenience, and dissatisfaction with/desire to leave clinical practice as major motivators. Doctoral degree holding dental hygienists identified expanded/alternate career opportunities as major motivation but also cited program convenience as an influencer. The availability of distance and flexible programming is a novel finding that positively influences the pursuit of advanced education. CONCLUSION: Dental hygienists are pursuing graduate education to expand their scope of knowledge and create new career opportunities. Graduate degree programs that accommodate work-life balance through flexible and online offerings are very attractive to dental hygienists.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".