(PO-074) Assessing Foundation Knowledge Application to Clinical Sciences Through Discipline Tagging

Author: Xiaoyuan Han, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry
Author: Annie N. Han, M.Ed. – Manager of Academic Support Services, Office of Academic Affairs, University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry
Author: Parvati H. Iyer, D.D.S. – Assistant Professor, Department of Diagnostic Sciences, University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry
Author: Nan (Tori) Xiao, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry
Author: Homayon Asadi, D.D.S. – Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry
Author: Malou Ruperto-Thompson, B.A. – Coordinator, University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry
Submitter: Annie N. Han, M.Ed. – Manager of Academic Support Services, Office of Academic Affairs, University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni Sc

Objectives: The new Integrated National Board Dental Examination (INBDE) brings new considerations to the teaching of basic biomedical sciences throughout the dental curriculum. Tracking biomedical sciences content performance through multi-course assessment data can help educators address how and to what extent the teaching of biomedical sciences knowledge strands is being applied to integrated clinical sciences coursework throughout students’ progression from preclinical to clinical experiences.

Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on 281 students in two continuous DDS classes. We analyzed student first-year performance from electronic assessments delivered in three biomedical sciences courses (specifically, Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry courses), and the first-year comprehensive integrated clinical sciences course. All major assessment questions were tagged to our school’s established dental disciplines index using Examsoft. Category report data was used to build a Pearson correlation matrix to study association between first-year biomedical sciences knowledge and integrated clinical sciences performance.

Results: All correlations in the matrix were statistically significant (P < 0.05) after Bonferroni correction. The high correlation coefficient ( >0.75) between any two biomedical sciences courses showed that students performed very similarly among all three biomedical science courses. However, correlation coefficients between biomedical sciences courses and same tags in the integrated clinical science course were all less than 0.5 (anatomy: 0.42; physiology: 0.26; biochemistry: 0.48), showing inconsistent student performance in applying and translating foundation knowledge into integrated clinical sciences course.

Conclusion: The Examsoft Categories tagging system, when aligned to a program disciplines index, served as a useful quantitative tool to regularly evaluate student performance. In our case, analysis suggested a gap between basic sciences foundation knowledge and clinical application within our applied clinical science course. Future directions are to evaluate discrepancies in students’ knowledge-to-application. Such review will build towards closing learning application gaps, and consider content delivery, sequencing and reinforcement opportunities across the dental curriculum.