Effect of dental students as instructors on preclinical performance in prosthodontics

Dental schools continue to have difficulty recruiting and retaining faculty. One approach to augment student learning would be to train and utilize senior dental students as instructors in preclinical courses. This study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of using senior dental students as instructors on the performance of second-year students in two preclinical prosthodontic courses. In the spring term of 2007, four senior dental students and four or five full-time faculty were assigned as instructors for the fixed prosthodontics and complete denture prosthodontics preclinical courses. Each course has previously been conducted with a total of seven to nine faculty instructors. The performance of two groups of second-year students on preclinical projects was compared based upon their source of instruction for the project. The scores for the two groups were compared using the Wilcoxon rank sum tests and the corresponding 95 percent confidence intervals for the median difference in scores for the two instructor types. This study found no significant difference in performance between sophomore students instructed by full-time faculty or those instructed by senior dental students in either the fixed or removable prosthodontics preclinical courses (p>.05). The use of senior dental students as instructors in the preclinical prosthodontics courses may be one option to partially address the shortage of full-time dental faculty.