Teaching, learning and evaluation of professionalism in dental education: A narrative review

Background Professionalism is an essential competence needed in the practice of dentistry. Teaching-learning and assessment of this competency is a part of the dental curriculum. We reviewed evidence in the literature regarding methods used for teaching, learning, evaluation and assessment of professional competency in undergraduate dental education. Methods Three different databases were searched for peer-reviewed full-text articles of studies relating to teaching- learning or evaluation of professionalism among dental undergraduate students. The evidence was then screened and the quality of the evidence was analysed by two different reviewers. Results A total of 573 articles were found relating to the topic and after removal of duplicates and initial title and abstract based screening using inclusion and exclusion criteria, 29 articles were shortlisted. Four more were excluded as the full-text of the articles could not be obtained. After full-text screening, 4 more articles were excluded due to variations in the abstract and methodologies in the full-text. Twenty-one articles were finally divided into 12 articles regarding teaching- learning and 9 articles regarding assessment methodologies and subjected to quality analysis. Conclusion Eleven methods for teaching and 8 methods for evaluation of professional competencies were found. The available literature on teaching, learning and assessing professionalism for dental undergraduate education is of moderate to low quality. Various authors have evaluated different methods but there is scope for improving the study designs to be more robust and the tools for assessment need to be refined.