What Helps Dental Professionals Retain What They Read in Periodical Publications?

Despite articles advising health care professionals about how to read the literature and surveys of time spent reading, there have been no studies of what dentists or dental educators actually recall from the formal and informal literature. The aim of this study was to begin to develop data on this subject with convenience samples of 62 clinical faculty members at one U.S. dental school and a group of 33 dental editors. Members of the two groups were surveyed about their interest in and familiarity with a sample of items from the Journal of the American Dental Association and the ADA News, including research articles, editorials, advertisements, and announcements about programs and people. The participants also completed a multiple-choice test about the essential feature of each item, a measure that reflected the degree of retention of content from reading prior to the study. The results showed that both groups had the greatest interest in content that presented scientific findings or responsible opinion. By contrast, they rated the advertisements and announcements as uninteresting and did not recall their content well. Based on the findings that reading an item produced better recall if the item was of interest, a hierarchical model for learning from the literature is hypothesized, one that is supported by the social psychology literature.