Effectiveness of a five-step method for teaching clinical skills to students in a dental college in India

This study conducted at the PDM Dental College and Research Institute, Haryana, India, had the purpose of developing a teaching method based upon a five-step method for teaching clinical skills to students proposed by the American College of Surgeons. This five-step teaching method was used to place fissure sealants as an initial procedure by dental students in clinics. The sealant retention was used as an objective evaluation of the skill learnt by the students. The sealant retention was 92 percent at six- and twelve-month evaluations and 90 percent at the eighteen-month evaluation. These results indicate that simple methods can be devised for teaching clinical skills and achieve high success rates in clinical procedures requiring multiple steps.