The Learning of Metacognitive Skills through Task Management Structures (TKS) – A New Opportunity for Dental Student Education

Today, we are preparing students to learn throughout their lives. Dental students must have problem solving, critical thinking and independent learning skills to meet the challenges of becoming effective clinicians. Dental students, however, find diagnostic and treatment planning challenges difficult to manage as many do not have the cognitive framework to solve them. The practice of dentistry is experiential. It contains a large body of tacit knowledge. To help students to become effective learners and acquire lifelong learning skills, they need to be taught to problem solve, think critically, and to communicate and learn independently. Most of the continuous professional development (CPD), post graduation, is independently assimilated and delivered in a didactic style; so these new learning skills will also equip the new graduate with the critical thinking and problem solving tools they will need to self review, to reflect upon and to process new insights throughout their professional careers.

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is an instructional method that challenges students to ‘learn to learn’, through working co-operatively in groups to seek solutions to real world problems. It prepares students to think critically and analytically, and to find and use appropriate learning resources. However, the implementation of PBL is both time consuming and resource intensive. It is our belief that the learning of metacognitive skills can also be facilitated through task knowledge structures (TKS). This paper argues how the use of TKSs can help dental students to learn the metacognitive skills that they should have in order to prepare them for lifelong learning.