FUTURE OFDENTISTRYbeyond the minimal set permitted. Quality dental
assisting programs may also have the potential to
teach expanded duties to well-qualified dental assist-
ing candidates. The rational delegation of duties can
only be resolved and codified by state licensing
boards. Therefore, the dental and allied dental educa-
tion communities are dependent upon aspects of the
oral health care delivery system, other than them-
selves, to determine what, where and to whom appro-
priate patient care procedures may be taught.
ACCREDITATION OF PROGRAMS
Dental educators are strong supporters of accred-
ited programs for professional and health care relat-
ed education. Subjecting one's program to evalua-
tion and accreditation by external agencies is always
a stressful and expensive undertaking. The benefits
gained in higher and more uniform standards, as
well as in facilitating the movement of professionals,
vastly outweigh the institutional stresses and anxi-
eties that accreditation brings.
DISTANCE EDUCATION
Dental assisting and dental hygiene programs,
especially the latter, are showing considerable inno-
vation and leadership in successfully introducing a
variety of distance education modalities into their
training programs. Using both satellite and
Internet-based technologies, these innovative pro-
grams are bringing quality didactic presentations to
more remotely located students. In these cases, clin-
ical training is accomplished through intensive,
institution-based programs, combined with organ-
ized and supervised local opportunities. Programs
such as these, operating in states as diverse as
Louisiana, Wisconsin and Virginia, are important
indicators of future potential.
DENTAL LABORATORY TECHNOLOGY
As Tables 6.9 and 6.10 show, the major problem
faced by dental laboratory technology education
appears to be its imminent demise if current trends
continue. The seeds of the decreasing number of
dental laboratory technology graduates may be
numerous, but chief among them is the lack of a suf-
ficient salary differential for entry positions in the
commercial dental laboratory sector. One implica-
tion to be drawn from this situation is that in pure-
ly economic terms there may be insufficient value
provided by dental laboratory technology education
to justify a salary premium. In addition, as com-
mercial entities, the dental laboratories may simply
be more efficient with their in-house training meth-
ods. Another reason for decreasing student interest
in dental laboratory technology may be related to
the reports, mostly anecdotal, of a steady migration
of dental laboratory work to cheaper labor markets
in Asia, as well as in Central and South America.DENTAL SCHOOL CURRICULUMIn the United States, formal and comprehensive
studies of the dental school curriculum began with
the publication of the landmark Gies Report (Gies,
1926). Undertaken at the request of the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the
Gies Report established the university-based pre-
dental plus professional school curriculum that is
still in use today. The ADA first recommended in
1934 the four-year professional curriculum that is
the norm today (Field, 1995).
As reviewed by Tedesco, a number of subsequent
studies of the dental curriculum have followed, most
by either the Council of Dental Education of the
American Dental Association, or by the American
Association of Dental Schools (now the American
Dental Education Association) (Tedesco, 1995).
The most recent in-depth study of United States den-
tal education, including the dental school curricu-
lum, was undertaken and published by the Institute
of Medicine, a part of the United States National
Academy of Sciences, as Dental Education at the
Crossroads: Challenges and Change(Field, 1995).
During the past two decades in part through the
active collaborations of many individual dental facul-
ty members, and organizational entities including the
ADA Council On Dental Education, the Commission
on Dental Accreditation, and the AADS, there has
been much progress in developing a competency-
based curriculum for dental education. Concurrently,
a number of dental schools have adapted problem-
based learning (PBL) from medical schools, and have
initiated full or partial PBL-based curricula.
There is considerable heterogeneity in the dental
curricula among dental schools. Data collected by the
ADA and the Commission on Dental Accreditation
concerning the hours of instruction devoted to vari-
ous topics in the modern dental curriculum shows
wide variances. Differences in curriculum time allo-Dental Education