Teaching dental pain with and without underlying oral physiology: learning implications

This study investigated whether teaching undergraduate dental students the diagnosis and management of acute dental pain alongside the underpinning oral physiology helped them to understand the topic better than teaching them acute dental pain as a separate entity. Each of three clinical years of dental students at the same dental school was taught in two groups. Each group was taught the signs/symptoms of five acute dental pain conditions by the same member of the staff. However, the teaching for one group of students in each year reminded the students about the physiology that underpinned the clinical symptoms. One week later, the students completed an open-ended questionnaire that required them to list signs/symptoms of the five dental pain conditions. For each year of dental students that was examined, the mean student marks were significantly higher (p<0.05) for those who were taught dental pain and the underlying physiology compared with students who were only taught dental pain as a stand-alone subject. This suggests that integrating biomedical science and clinical teaching is beneficial.