Perceptions and practices of dental school faculty regarding evidence-based dentistry

Successful integration of critical thinking and evidence-based dentistry (EBD) concepts throughout didactic and clinical dental curricula require faculty support. Critical thinking and EBD definitions and practice continue to evolve, and not all dental faculty members were exposed to such concepts during their education. The objective of this study was to understand faculty members' perspectives on both critical thinking and EBD. An online survey was designed to assess full- and part-time faculty members' understanding, practice and teaching of critical thinking and EBD, interest in and perceived significance of EBD, and perceived barriers to teaching critical thinking and EBD at one U.S. dental school. Forty-three faculty members completed the survey for a 41 percent response rate. Most respondents (46 percent) defined critical thinking as the use of evidence or the scientific method in decision making and EBD as clinical practice based on "science only" (39 percent) or "quality science only" (34 percent). Based on their individual definitions, over 75 percent of the respondents reported incorporating critical thinking into didactic and clinical teaching; 79 percent and 47 percent, respectively, reported incorporating EBD into their didactic and clinical teaching. While these faculty members confirmed the importance of teaching students EBD, they identified barriers to teaching as time, knowledge, and resources. These results, which reflect one school's efforts to understand faculty perceptions and practices of EBD, suggest that faculty training and resource support are necessary for successful curricular integration of critical thinking and EBD.