Criticism of General Dentistry Curriculum in Line with Accountable and Justice-Oriented Education Package

Introduction: Curriculum revision is the basis and a necessity for development of education. The goal of General Dentistry curriculum is to train dentists with minimum expected competencies. Considering the importance of this field in promoting society’s health, this study was carried out in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in 2017 with the purpose of criticizing the general dentistry curriculum from stakeholders’ viewpoints in order to revise it in line with accountable and justice-oriented education package. Methods: This study employed a qualitative approach. Data were collected through reviewing the documents, individual and group interviews. Purposeful sampling was carried out with the participation of 30 stakeholders of general dentistry curriculum and holding 10 interview sessions. The interview transcripts were imported to MAXQDA-10 software and analyzed by directed (deductive) qualitative content analysis. Results: Curriculum criticism was conducted in 14 courses based on the stakeholders’ viewpoints and according to three main categories of weaknesses, strengths and proposed solutions from the stakeholders’ viewpoints and in accordance with the basic curriculum components including needs assessment, objectives, instructional strategies, content, educational sources, learning environment, learning activities, implementation and evaluation. Overall, from the stakeholders’ viewpoints, curriculum revision is useful but sudden changes without persuading stakeholders and the lack of suitable hardware and software infrastructures for implementation have led to failure in the curriculum implementation. Conclusion: It seems that stakeholders’ dissatisfaction with general dentistry is due to hasty implementation of the recently revised curriculum and lack of infrastructures to implement the curriculum and achieve its idealistic goals. Hence, revision through comprehensive needs assessment of curriculum stakeholders and pilot implementation and also providing executive infrastructures and persuading stakeholders for the sake of curriculum development and success are recommended.