Developing and Evaluating a New Preclinical Curriculum with Focus on Prevention in Dentistry

Background: New licensing regulations for dentists in Germany offered the opportunity to mod-ernize the dental curriculum regarding content, methodology and structure. Objective: This paper aims to evaluate the newly requested preclinical curriculum “Dental Pro-paedeutic – Focus on Prevention” by dental students and dental educators and to describe the process of development. Methodology: The curriculum was developed according to the Kern-cycle and the National Competence-Based Learning Objectives Catalog for Dentistry. Lesson planning was based on BLOOMs taxonomy and the taxonomy of significant learning, according to the principle of con-structive alignment. A variety of evidence based teaching methods were implemented. For eval-uation, dental students answered a written questionnaire, graded eight topics and added free-text. Dental educators were interviewed. Results: 55.5% dental students’ participated, highest grades were given to the learning atmos-phere. All dental educators involved in the delivery of the curriculum participated in the inter-view. Dental students and educators expressed satisfaction with this comprehensive teaching approach of prevention in an early stage of the dental curriculum. Dental educators reflected the high expenditure of time for development but valued the opportunity to participate in an evi-dence-based development process and to introduce various modern teaching and examination methods. The expenditure in time for the development, performance and examination was high. In order to perform 240 teaching units for 8 ECTS credits, 419 hours of conceptualiza-tion/preparation and 344 hours for examination had to be invested. This paper might help to facilitate better understanding of the chances and efforts accompanied by curricular changes.