The Dental Hygienists' Perception of the National Practical Examination

Ko, Da Kyung; Bae, Sung Suk

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine dental hygienists' perception of the current national practical examination. This research was performed using 199 self-reported surveys answered by professors of dental hygiene studies and clinical dental hygienist. Frequency analysis, chi-square tests, and analysis of variance were performed by using IBM SPSS Statistics ver. 20.0. The results revealed that many of the respondents consider the current national practical examination to be neutral. They did not think that the current national practical examination questions are useful for assessing occupation-centric integrated clinical practice ability and counseling techniques for patient intervention. The professors of dental hygiene studies believed that among the research tasks required as mentioned in the national practical examination questions, dental polishing and tooth brushing education are of paramount importance, whereas clinical dental hygienists believed that ultrasonic scaling is the most important (p<0.05). Most of the professors of dental hygiene studies reported that they conducted skills education for dental polishing and tooth brushing education, while most of the clinical dental hygienists reported that tasks actually performed in the clinic included impression taking, model fabrication, ultrasonic scaling, and explaining treatment precautions (p<0.05). Therefore, these tasks can be effectively carried out with the improvement of the national dental hygienist practical examination.