PhD candidate Claudia Cunningham's paper was accepted for publication in November 2018. This review highlighted the lack of literature available in relation to dental school selection methods and calls for further longitudinal research as a priority.
Little is known in terms of what works and what does not work in dental selection in terms of predicting future performance accurately and fairly. Given this, Claudia's aim was to synthesize the last 30 years of research investigating the predictive validity of dental school selection methods.
The review concludes that there is insufficient high quality evidence from which to draw any conclusions as to the best selection methods to use in dental school selection. Without this, designing selection frameworks for dentistry which are appropriately weighted, reliable and valid remains a challenge.