Introduction
Postdoctoral General Dentistry (PGD) programs play an important and expanding role in the education of the nation's primary health care providers in dentistry. These programs build on and complement predoctoral dental education. In these postdoctoral programs, dental school graduates: learn new techniques; become proficient in previously learned techniques; become capable of providing dental care for patients with complex medical, dental, and social conditions; and learn to integrate professional values with various aspects of dental treatment in order to provide long term comprehensive care to individuals and communities of patients.
There is a growing trend in dental education to describe curricula in terms of their impact on students (expressed as competencies) rather than on discipline-based content (expressed as behavioral objectives).3 Such a description focuses attention on the outcome, in terms of graduate’s abilities, of educational experiences, rather than on the process of education. This focus is more likely to create a graduate with the desired skills and to encourage program directors to choose and provide educational experiences that will lead to the development of graduates with those skills.
The director and faculty of the Advanced Education Program in General Dentistry (AEGD) at the University of Maryland, Dental School are committed to incorporating competency and proficiency concepts and evaluation methodologies into the program. This document presents a method for describing graduates of University of Maryland Dental School AEGD program in terms of their abilities and methodologies for assessing those abilities. It is anticipated that this document will be useful for: applicants to the program desiring to know what skills they can expect to gain in the program; residents in the program who will be able to measure their progress and document their accomplishments in the areas of competency and proficiency described; and for the program director and faculty who will be able to use these measures for outcomes assessment and continuous improvement of the program.