There has been a growing interest among dental educators regarding the opportunities offered by community-based dental education as a means to allow dental students to assume their role as health professionals in the real world. Although several dental schools have integrated community-based education into their curricula, most have not engaged their students in the development of competencies to address dental health needs at the community level. The purpose of this article is to discuss the teaching-learning experiences in dental public health at the undergraduate level in the Faculty of Stomatology at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (FS-UPCH) in Lima, Peru. The teaching-learning activities in dental public health at the FS-UPCH consist of two well-defined stages: experiences in low-income urban communities and experiences in low-income rural communities. Both stages have been designed to make it possible for students to acquire competency in addressing oral health needs at the community level as well as to enlarge and deepen their knowledge about the social and health situation in Peru. In community-based dental education, students are not only placed in community settings to treat individual patients, but also challenged to consider dental public health issues, including the administrative aspects of dental services.

The aim of this study was to assess the level of self-perceived competency in dental public health in recent graduates from the Faculty of Stomatology of the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. One hundred and nineteen graduates (28.6 percent males and 71.4 percent females) were asked to rate their self-perception of proficiency on each of the twenty-one dental public health functions identified in a dental practice competency matrix. Students assessed their competence in these dental public health functions using a three-point ordinal scale with 0 indicating "not at all competent," 1 indicating "competent," and 2 indicating "very competent." Males scored themselves higher than females for items concerning "design, develop, and evaluate community restorative interventions," "apply basic maintenance to dental equipment and instruments," and "participate in an epidemiological surveillance system." However, there were no significant differences for any item according to age. A confirmatory factorial analysis provided two factors with Eigenvalues greater than one (13.09 and 1.53, respectively), which explained 62.3 percent and 7.3 percent of the variance in the graduates' responses respectively. However, the fact that all twenty-one dental public health functions loaded higher than 0.55 on the first factor led to the conclusion that the dental public health competency is perceived by students to be a one-dimensional construct. Graduates perceived themselves as very competent for solving dental health needs at the community level. This study also provided further evidence in support of the rationale for the competencybased dental curriculum of the Faculty of Stomatology of the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.

The objective of this article is to propose a classification of dental competencies. Interest in dental competencies has grown consistently during the last three decades. However, the dental education literature suggests that the term “competency” is understood and used differently by dental schools around the world. The taxonomic classification of dental competencies we propose follows a systematic approach starting at the highest level of complexity, i.e., the professional profile the teaching institution envisions for its graduates, and following in a decreasing degree of complexity to competency function, task, step, movement, and moment. This taxonomy has proved to be useful for more than thirty years in the Dental School of the Peruvian University Cayetano Heredia. Graduates of this school are successful practitioners, teachers, and researchers in Peru and other countries. The classification proposed here should clarify terms, facilitate curriculum design and learning assessment, stimulate further discussion on the matter, and facilitate communication among the dental education establishment.

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Esta investigación evaluó, de manera independiente, la influencia de dos herramientas académicas sobre el porcentaje de alumnos aprobados en la asignatura de Biología General: la clasificación según rendimiento en la prueba diagnóstica y la nivelación ejercida por un ciclo propedéuticoprevio. Se estudió el rendimiento académico en esta asignatura de los alumnos el año 2007, los cuales fueron clasificados en tres aulas según las notas que obtuvieron en una prueba diagnóstica aplicada previamente, comparándolo con el de los alumnos que cursaron el año 2006. Tambiénse comparó el rendimiento académico de los alumnos que cursaron un ciclo propedéutico el año 2008, con los alumnos del año 2006. En ambos casos se utilizó el coeficiente de correlación de Spearman. Se encontró correlación de las notas finales obtenidas en la asignatura con las notasdel ciclo propedéutico (r=0,71) y con las notas de la prueba diagnóstica aplicada al inicio de la asignatura (r=0,51). La correlación entre notas obtenidas en el ciclo propedéutico y prueba diagnóstica fue más baja (r=0,47). Las notas del propedéutico corresponden casi con exactitudcon las notas finales de la asignatura, lo cual no siempre ocurre con las notas de la prueba diagnóstica. Se concluye sobre la importancia de la prueba diagnóstica como evaluación inicial, las ventajas y desventajas del agrupamiento homogéneo en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje,y respecto al rol del ciclo propedéutico como mecanismo para proporcionar herramientas a los alumnos que faciliten su aprendizaje durante la etapa de formación universitaria, que incluyen: métodos de estudio, habilidades para utilizar la tecnología e informática, competencias en inglés, entre otros.