Confirming the validity of Part II of the National Board Dental Examinations: a practice analysis.

Successful completion of Part II of the National Board Dental Examinations is a part of the licensure process for dentists. Good testing practice requires that the content of a high stakes examination like Part II be based on a strong relationship between the content and the judgments of practicing dentists on what is important to their practice of dentistry. In an effort to demonstrate this relationship for Part II, the Joint Commission conducted a practice analysis, which involved a two-dimensional model. The sixty-three Competencies of the New Dentist, developed and promulgated by the American Dental Education Association, were used for one dimension, and the current content specifications were used for the other. A survey of 520 practicing dentists was conducted to determine the importance of each of the competencies for patient care. These dentists were recent graduates of accredited programs and passed Part II three to five years prior to the conduct of the practice analysis. The survey directed the respondents to rate the importance of the competencies on a scale from 1 to 5. Of the 520 in the sample, 244 dentists responded. The reliability index was above 0.90. The importance rating for each competency was translated into the associated number of items. The number of items devoted to each competency was allocated to the current content elements that are related to the knowledge and problem-solving skills that support each competency. The findings specified revisions in the relative number of items dedicated to the various elements in the specifications. These findings indicate that the items on the examination under the current distribution adequately reflected practice. In general, there were relatively small changes in the content specifications. The total number of changes in items was forty-eight, which represents changes in slightly less than 10 percent of the overall number of items.