Page 126 - Demo

Chapter 7124after dental trauma or for the treatment of resorptions, they generally referred their patients to an endodontist, and for endodontic surgery to an oral surgeon (data not shown). Altogether, this made us wonder which role more experienced dentists play for novice dentists. It would be interesting to further explore this. Modelling, persuasion and feedback can be expected, for instance, and all may influence self-efficacy, positively or negatively (Gist & Mitchell 1992, Wulf et al. 2010). Besides, more experienced dentists may influence the attitude of the novice dentist, and attitudes are a cornerstone of professional action (Passi et al. 2010). Professional action involves knowledge, skills and attitudes, and professionalism is learned for an important part by modelling (Passi et al. 2010). Professionalism is developmental and highly context specific (Passi et al. 2010). At the dental school, teaching staff act consciously or unconsciously as role model (Cruess et al. 2008, Passi et al. 2010). They should be aware of that and trained for it (Field et al. 2017). However, also the conditions should be favourable; an institutional culture that leaves insufficient time for supervisors to promote the type of reflective practice needed to demonstrate best practices amongst students, is detrimental to effective role modelling (Cruess et al. 2008). Besides, the prevailing culture can facilitate failure to fail (i.e. passing underperformance)(Monrouxe et al. 2011). Failure to fail jeopardizes the assurance that at the end of their undergraduate training students fulfil all the requirements for graduation, which is the basis for professional action. Hence, the dental school’s culture should be reflected on to be able to ensure quality education. That the majority of ACTA students wanted more feedback from their supervisors (chapter 4), might be a sign of an institutional culture that is suboptimal. However, it could as well be a sign that the supervisors were not trained enough in providing feedback. Although the finding was considered to be a reflection of the variability in students’ learning preferences (chapter 4), it is advised to explore other possibilities as well, because that may help to understand which measures would be effective to accomplish that the students perceive that they receive ample feedback from their supervisors. With the recent introduction of a new portfolio system to monitor the student’s individual progress in their clinical work, ACTA has taken a step to improve the educational system. The new system uses entrustable professional activities (EPAs) for the assessment of student’s learning and their development, and to collect feedback. With an EPA-based clinical assessment system, the students are responsible for the acquisition of sufficient feedback (Bremer et al. 2022). This Annemarie Baaij.indd 124 28-06-2023 12:26