The effect of clinical experience on dental students' ability to design removable partial denture frameworks

To determine whether clinical experience influenced dental students' ability to correctly design removable partial denture frameworks, four combinations of six casts depicting various partially edentulous situations were used in the study. The authors independently rated the casts as to the degree of difficulty on a three-point scale. Only those casts for which there were 100% agreement were used. All of the casts that were used had a moderate degree of difficulty rating (level 2). The dental student sample consisted of 34 second-year students who had just completed 98 hours of instruction in removable partial dentures. Each student was given six casts on which to design removable partial denture frameworks. The students were evaluated before clinical experience in removable prosthodontics and after 1 year of removable prosthodontic experience. The results indicated that the dental students made significantly fewer errors in framework design after clinical experience. Errors on two of 13 framework design items were increased postclinically. The increase in errors on these two items may have been the result of a lack of attention to detail or a lack of reinforcement in learning certain basic concepts.