Page 50 - Demo

Chapter 348No one estimated his or her endodontic skills to be completely equal to those expected of a general dental practitioner (Table 1, question 5). That may reflect feelings of unpreparedness, which in their turn may be caused by lack of confidence, even though the answers to the questions regarding how competent the students felt were more favourable (Table 1, questions 1-4). This difference might indicate that students who are about to graduate have higher expectations of a general dental practitioner’s skills than they do of their own. To graduates, this may be an incentive to continue learning and improving their skills. Moreover, no student denied completely the need for extra education (Table 1). Altogether, this fits the underlying principle of the Undergraduate Curriculum Guidelines for Endodontology of the European Society of Endodontology (ESE guidelines)that: ‘a minimal level of competence is reached prior to graduation and that an ethos of continuing professional development is instilled in the graduate’ (26). The relationship found between the performance of students in performing root canal treatment and their answer to the question ‘I know how to manage complications that may occur while performing endodontic treatment’ might be explained by the influence of feedback. Especially in situations where students are aware that they perform below the norm, their feelings of confidence in their performance decrease (27). The assessed root canal treatment to determine students’ performance was presumably one of the last endodontic treatments the student performed before completing the questionnaire and thus might have influenced the students’ answers. The way the quality of the root canal treatment was determined in the present study was based, among other criteria, on the occurrence of ledges, perforations, transportations or instrument separation, which are all considered ‘complications’. If one of those complications occurred, the quality was determined as ‘poor’. A recently experienced complication while performing a root canal treatment which caused a ‘poor’ result might have lowered the student’s feelings of knowledge about managing those complications (28). The increased self-perceived competence of students who attended the revised theoretical training module might have been due to vicarious learning. During the weekly tutorials given over a trimester, numerous as well as various cases can be discussed. This adds knowledge; one can learn from the experiences of another, and tutoring by endodontists may add credibility. Fellow students are good role models to increase feelings of preparedness: ‘if they can do it, I can do it’. Moreover, imagining or watching another person’s actions activates the same Annemarie Baaij.indd 48 28-06-2023 12:26