Dental Students and Faculty Perceptions of Teaching Methods: Traditional Classes, Online Virtual Classes, and Recorded Lectures

Enhancing the student learning experience: Co-teaching biochemistry and clinical sciences within the dental curriculum

Basic knowledge of biochemistry underpins oral and dental care. Undergraduate dental students do not always engage well with basic science teaching due to not appreciating its clinical relevance. Co-teaching provides one approach to overcome students' disengagement and involves two lecturers, with complementary expertise, presenting the curriculum together. This study investigated student experiences and engagement using co-teaching to integrate biochemistry with clinical sciences in the students' second-year dental curriculum. Two successive second year dental student cohorts were co-taught. Content was delivered by a biochemist and an oral biologist, either online (during the 2020 COVID lockdown) or in-person (2021). Each cohort was surveyed at the end of the teaching module using an online questionnaire containing both interval scale and free-text questions. Responses were received from 39 (42%) and 64 (85%) of students in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Students from both cohorts preferred the co-teaching approach with a mean of 8.74 on a 10-point interval scale. In 2020 and 2021, 77% and 76% of participants, respectively, preferred a combined biochemistry and clinical dentistry delivery, either in-person (37%), via Zoom (19%) or via video recording (14%). Thematic analysis of responses revealed students experienced enhanced engagement when co-taught and they attributed this to integration of the curriculum making the content more relevant and stimulating. Students preferred co-teaching to individual subjects being taught by a single teacher. Co-teaching established the relevance of theoretical biochemistry to clinical dental sciences and enhanced the students' learning experience.

Perceptions and Expectations of Academic Staff in Bucharest towards the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Dental Education

Dental education was severely challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. The evaluation of the viewpoint of the dental teachers of the Faculty of Dentistry at "Carol Davila" University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, Romania, on these exceptional circumstances' consequences was the objective of this paper. A cross-sectional study was conducted in April 2022, on the academic staff who reported their perceptions of the emotional and educational impact of the pandemic by completing a Google Forms questionnaire. Although a significant emotional impact of the pandemic was reported by over a third of the participants (31.2%), most of them being teachers of fifth-year dental students (p = 0.019), the perceived stress had an impact on the teaching performance in few of them (14%), the quality of sleep remaining unaffected in most of them (53.7%), whereas the level of anxiety was low (57%). An educational impact regarding the techno difficulties during the online transition was mentioned by few respondents (16.1%), with male teaching staff facing the fewest problems (p = 0.024), as well as low levels of difficulties in transmitting academic information (11.9), with men also being the most unaffected (p = 0.006). More than half of the participants (59.1%) rather see digital and/or virtual education during the pandemic as having adverse effects on the educational system, the most sceptical being teachers of the fifth (p = 0.001) and sixth years (p = 0.001). The COVID-19 pandemic affected the academic staff of the Faculty of Dentistry at "Carol Davila" University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, Romania, not only at a personal level but also at a professional, pedagogical one, due to the introduction of the online teaching system followed by the hybrid one. Age group, gender, and teaching year differentiated the degree of emotional and educational impairment.