It's time to begin testing my potential solution to my professional problem. As an instructor, I've noticed that my undergraduate students are not retraining dentistry course content. Their inability to grasp concepts of dental abnormalities negatively affects their charting performance during their quizzes and final exam. It's taken some time to get here, but I recently realized through brainstorming and reflection that students struggle to grasp abnormals in dentistry because they rarely retain knowledge about normal tooth anatomy and oral health.
To help students retrieve knowledge of normal tooth anatomy and ensure concrete understanding of why normal tooth anatomy matters, I've created a student worksheet. This worksheet can be viewed in this Google Doc.
Hoping to make this assignment impactful (i.e., help students better grasp the concepts of dental abnormalities), I've asked students to define terms, draw pictures, describe normals, and view snapshots of images. Students often use images provided of multiple different types of teeth to help orient themselves in a patient's mouth. Using other anatomical landmarks is helpful in identifying tooth type and number, but it also allows students to overlook the specific characteristics of these normal tooth type surfaces. Asking students to identify tooth type based on a snapshot of the patient's mouth will reinforce the importance of understanding these details, as this is foundational information that abnormals will build on.
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