Reflective practice among undergraduate dental students
8th International Conference and Exhibition on Dentistry & Oral Care
April 18-20, 2016 Dubai, UAE

Shaima Bahammam, Dalal ALQahtani,Lama Alabdulaaly and Lamya almejrad

King Saud University, KSA

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Oral Health Dent Manag

Abstract:

Reflective practice is a form of critical thinking where the individuals evaluate their intentions and actions to learn from their past experiences for future improvement. Thus, Reflection is strongly related to learning. Our aim was to assess reflective practice among undergraduate dental students and assess any associations with gender, GPA, academic level or clinical experience. Crosssectional study was performed on all undergraduate dental students in King Saud University (KSU) (593 students). Reflection-in learning-scale, which was developed by Sobral et al 2005, was used to assess the individual�??s level of reflection. The response rate was 62 %. After exclusion of incomplete surveys, we ended up with 47% of the total sample. The level of reflection among dental students in KSU was of moderate level (4.4 out of 7-likert scale). There was no difference between male and female students (4.35±.9 vs. 4.33±0.8 respectively; p=.9). Also, reflection didn't changed significantly over the years. On contrary, students reflected less in the senior years where they supposed to have clinical experience compared with pre-clinical years (4.3±0.9 vs. 4.5±0.8). GPA was not found to be correlated with level of reflection. In conclusion, Undergraduate dental students have a moderate level of reflective thinking. No difference was shown between genders in that skill. Students in clinical years didn't show higher level of reflection compared with pre-clinical students. Further research is needed to investigate the impact of reflection on students�?? learning and clinical performance.

Biography :

Shaima Bahammam is a dental intern at King Saud University, College of Dentistry. She graduated with first degree honor. She is working on a number of researches with the faculty of the college, 2 researches are now in the process of publication and the rest is still ongoing. She presented some of the researches in many conferences locally and internationally and awarded the 4th in undergraduate research competition which was organized by King Saud University.

Email: Shaima.bahammam@gmail.com