Comparisons in Basic Science Learning Outcomes Between Students in PBL and Traditional Dental Curricula at the Same Dental School

Comparison of student achievement on external assessment measures constitutes an important criterion for program evaluation. Standardized national dental board exams exist to permit comparisons between different dental curriculum structures. In the United States, the National Board Dental Examination (NBDE) Part 1 is one of the required steps for licensure. The NBDE Part 1 assesses dental students with respect to their knowledge of the basic sciences that establish the foundation for clinical dentistry. Some US dental schools have incorporated successful completion of NBDE Part 1 as a requirement for promotion to the clinical patient care component of their dental curriculum. The outcomes assessment processes that are required for accreditation of US dental schools have also incorporated NBDE scores as an external metric of the effectiveness of the dental curriculum. Thus NBDE Part 1 achievement can be a useful criterion for measuring the effectiveness of different pedagogies to provide the basic science content of a dental curriculum. The University of Southern California School of Dentistry (USCSD) began using a problem-based learning (PBL) pedagogy to provide the dental curriculum in 1995 to a subset of students learning in parallel to their peers enrolled in a traditional lecture-based system. Between 1997 and 2002, six classes of the PBL pilot and the traditional lecture-based students completed the same NBDE Part 1 examination. In 2001 the entire dental school adopted the PBL pedagogical approach for all students enrolled in the dental education program. This chapter compares the achievement of dental students on NBDE Part 1 at USCSD prior to the beginning of the PBL pilot program, during the 6 years when PBL and traditional ran in parallel and after the entire dental education program became PBL-based.