Male Dental Students Overestimate Their Skills
- Details
- Published: Wednesday, 15 September 2021 07:35
- Written by Chris Tapper
- Hits: 2282
An interesting new study has found that male dental students overestimate their performance more significantly than females.
Third year dental students at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine were asked to score themselves after completing a Class II amalgam preparation and filling and a Class III composite preparation and filling.
The scores of students were then compared against scores given by teaching staff at the faculty.
The study, published in the Journal of Dental Education, found that unlike their male peers, female students were more likely to underestimate their performance in the restorative procedures.
But researchers found that both genders overestimated their skill levels compared to those assessments given by the faculty.
The study was carried out over six years, and involved 208 students, from 2016 to 2021.
The same two calibrated faculty members independently graded all the students’ preparations and restorations over the entire length of the study.
The authors wrote “Self-assessment is a fundamental skill for dentists and other health care providers. It enables these professionals’ ability to critically evaluate the quality of their clinical work and improve through self-directed learning.”
The authors wrote “Our findings demonstrate that, overall,both genders overestimated their performance, and males overestimated their abilities significantly more than females. Therefore, we can reject our null hypothesis that there is no difference between male and female student’s self-assessment skills in operative preclinical exercises.
“These results corroborate previous studies showing gender influences on self-assessment in many healthcare training settings.”
“Our study also found that, on average, both male and female students overestimated their performance on all four assigned preclinical operative procedures.”
“When each gender group was divided into quartiles based on their faculty grading scores, it was found that the lower performing males and females overestimated their performance while higher performing males and females underestimated theirs. Our previous studies have shown similar findings from the student populations with males and females together.”
“These findings may align with the psychological phenomenon, cognitive bias of illusory superiority. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority suggests that lower performers inaccurately judge their performance because they overestimate their own abilities, while higher performers underestimate their abilities because they believe the average person performs better than they do in actuality.”
The authors concluded “Recognizing factors that affect self-assessment ability is important because dentists must learn to accurately evaluate their clinical work in order to improve through self-directed learning.”
“The results of this study illustrate that self-assessment skills differ between males and females, with males on average overestimating their performances to a greater extent than females in operative preclinical dentistry.”
“This study has been an important start to understandinghow gender may affect self-assessment accuracy, which will lead to further investigation.”
You need to be logged in to leave comments.
Report