Ten‐year study of strategies for teaching clinical inference in predoctoral orthodontic education

Dealing with the continuum of malocclusions in general practice requires diagnostic skills that, according to the Council on Dental Education guidelines, should include an ability to evaluate the severity of malocclusions and to assess the degree of treatment difficulty. This level of diagnostic skills is predicated upon the ability to make a judgment on the basis of inherently ill‐defined and insufficient data or, in other words, upon the ability to use rules and procedures of clinical inference. However, conventional methods of predoctoral orthodontic instruction appear to be unsuitable for transmitting these complex skills to dental students. For ten years, alternative instructional strategies involving guided discovery learning, repetitive practice in application of facts and principles to real‐life problems, and eventually a prescriptive diagnostic model were employed at our institution. Both classroom instruction and evaluation were focused on attaining mastery in two narrowly specified domains: “Evaluating the Severity of Malocclusions” and “Assessing the Degree of Treatment Difficulty.” The large proportion of items mastered by students and the high percent correct recorded on multiple‐choice examinations suggest that these instructional methods may be effective for teaching clinical inference at the predoctoral level of dental education.