Evaluation of the Students’ Attitude and Satisfaction of Educational Situation in Shiraz Dental School

Abstract

Statement of problem: Awareness of clinical dental students’ points of view about the educational situation of different departments will help faculty members and those in charge of educational affairs to improve the students’ qualitative as well as quantitative scientific skills. Being so, to achieve such a goal, it seems necessary to conduct a research on evaluation of educational condition of different dental departments from students’ points of view.Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate the weak and strong points of different departments of Shiraz Dental School as determined by dental students’ points of view in order to present new methods to improve future educational policies of dental departments.Materials and Method: In this cross-sectional study, a questionnaire made of seventeen standard questions was used. After confirmation of the validity of the questions, the questionnaires were distributed among 43 fifth and sixth year students of Shiraz Dental School. After completion of the questionnaires, the data were analyzed by Kruskall- Wallis and Mann- Whitney tests, using SPSS software.Results: Based on the results of this study, although there was a low rate of fluctuation in the students’ rate of satisfaction from educational situation of different departments, the highest satisfaction rate was belonged to pedodontics and periodontics departments respectively , and the least satisfaction rate belonged to oral surgery department.Conclusion: In spite of the difference in answers given to similar questions such as scientific capability of faculty members, equipment of departments and behavior of personnel and faculty members to students, generally speaking, the rate of students’ satisfaction from different departments was almost similar to each other and had a low fluctuation rate ( p > 0.05).Key words: Evaluation of quality of education, Clinical departments, School of dentistry, Studentś view points.