Launched in 2017, ADEA eLearn has provided over 100 free webinars to ADEA members since its inception. With a wide variety of topics offered, ADEA eLearn strives to share innovative solutions for the needs of a rapidly changing dental education environment. In 2022, the most popular webinar was entitled, “Caries Management Competency: Implementation of This New CODA Requirement,” which shared the educational approach that four institutions took when satisfying this new standard.

Educational Pathways has been working with Bravery Media, a higher education website design and digital strategy company, to develop new search and program directories for ADEA CAAPID^® (ADEA Centralized Application for Advanced Placement for International Dentists), ADEA DHCAS^® (ADEA Dental Hygiene Centralized Application Service) and ADEA PASS^® (ADEA Postdoctoral Application Support Service). The directory is now formally known as the “CAS Program Finder.” The ADEA DHCAS and ADEA CAAPID Program Finders, are now available. The ADEA PASS Program Finder will be available prior to the start of the 2023 application cycle.

The third annual ADEA CAAPID^® (ADEA Centralized Application for Advanced Placement for International Dentists) Virtual Fair took place Dec. 1, 2022, attracting 1,882 registrants and 779 attendees during the scheduled programming. The event hosted 33 programs and highlighted three new on-demand videos on “Faculty Insight & Information on the Application Process”, “Low GPA & High Hope: Personal Application Stories” and “The Five Mistakes We Make in the Application Process”. The post event survey engaged 182 registrants representing a 23% response rate, who rated the overall event at excellent or good at 94%.

• Chonte James presented at the National Association of Advisors in the Health Professions (NAAHP) annual meeting in Denver on June 17, 2022. The topic of the presentation was “When You Wish Upon an Audit! Revealing Insights from a Full Review of the ADEA AADSAS Application”.
• Elizabeth Johnson, M.S., co-presented with Amish Singh, D.D.S., Director of Diversity Programming from the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine, on “Using DiSC to Help Students Align Professional and Personal Development When Determining the Best Career Fit”.
• Jessica O’Keefe presented on “Are You Speaking Student? Aligning Data and Communications to Serve Students, Schools, and Your Organization” at the 2022 Liaison Centralized Application Services Summit and the Experience: Liaison User Conference in Boston on July 27−28. The presentation shared strategies ADEA has implemented using Liaison’s Enrollment Marketing Platform (EMP) to evaluate and customize inquiry forms and communications to improve the student experience and organizational data.

A group of ADEA AADSAS® (ADEA Associated American Dental Schools Application Service) admission officers completed a year and a half audit of the ADEA AADSAS application. The goals were to ensure the ADEA AADSAS application did not place an undue burden on applicants and that dental school admission officers had the information needed to adequately evaluate applicants for admission into their program. The audit’s results did not reveal any major changes needed to the application; however, some recommendations included adding language in the Help Center to clarify instructions for applicants, especially around completing the Experiences Section and Experience Type; creating a guideline document in the future for advisors about writing a Letter of Evaluation for a dental school applicant; adding the Canadian provinces in the standard state lookup list in the application; and reviewing and updating the course subjects and standard occupation classifications.

ADEA Educational Pathways hosted a webinar on June 9, 2022, on Criminal Background Check for all Centralized Application Services with over 50 individuals attending. Suzi Arant from Certiphi Screening Inc. presented and covered the following topics:

• Communicating with applicants on information collected and delivery of results,
• Screening services included in the background check,
• Reporting filter options available to participating schools and
• Managing the background screening and best practices for reviewing results.

ADEA Connect, ADEA’s online platform that allows members to collaborate with their colleagues, started a new feature that allows members to get help with platform-related questions via real-time chat conversations. ADEA debuted this service at the 2022 ADEA Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Workshop and Fall Meetings conference. Attendees appreciated that they could have their questions answered in real-time without having to leave their respective sessions.

ADEA launched the 2022 ADEA Allied Dental Program Directors Survey in November 2022. This survey, conducted in alternating years, collects data on salaries, faculty appointments, vacant and lost positions and workloads. Results are used by program directors in program improvement. A summary report with an interactive dashboard is posted on the ADEA website.

With the ambassador role formally added to the responsibilities of the Secretary position for ADEA Section and Special Interest Groups, ADEA developed a program that includes resources to help ambassadors manage their respective communities. These include a bank of seed questions to prompt community engagement, a dedicated community and bi-monthly meetings. In addition, a contest exclusively for ambassadors was held in December 2022 and six winners (two each for dental school members, allied members and student members) received free registrations to the 2023 ADEA Annual Session & Exhibition.

Rebecca Stolberg, RDH, M.S., ADEA Vice President of Allied Dental Education and Faculty Development, piloted a new virtual mentoring program for 24 new allied dental program directors. Participants attended monthly to hear an expert speak on a topic chosen from their list of requests. Participants networked in their private ADEA Connect community and sessions were recorded and available in their community library for later viewing. Excellent participant feedback helped make this program permanent.

Approved by the ADEA 2021 House of Delegates and in collaboration with the American Dental Hygienists’ Association (ADHA), the ADEA Graduate Dental Hygiene Program Aims and Outcomes provide updated (from 2011 guidelines) guidance for graduate programs in dental hygiene.

Graduate education in dental hygiene is imperative to develop a cadre of dental hygiene specialists who advance the profession, assume leadership roles in health care and education, elevate the profile of dental hygiene on multidisciplinary teams and develop scholars who generate and disseminate knowledge. Dental hygiene graduate education should be multifaceted, composed of theory and practical application, and be based on a body of knowledge specific to the discipline of dental hygiene and the roles of the dental hygienist. In addition, a master’s degree program in dental hygiene must meet the diverse needs and interests of the profession and its students, as well as prepare graduates to meet the complex oral health needs of a diverse population

The new 2022 ADEA Entry Level Competencies for Allied Dental Professionals updates the 2012 version and for the first time presents foundational competencies relevant to all allied dental professions.

The dental workforce is comprised of dental assistants, dental hygienists, dental laboratory technicians, dental therapists, dentists and all advanced and future dental practitioners. All dental health care providers collaborate with one another and related professionals to deliver continuing oral care and support patients by addressing health care issues affecting society. They are members of interprofessional and intraprofessional teams, emphasizing evidence-based practice, quality assurance and informatics. Therefore, it is logical that foundational competencies cross over all professions. These foundational competencies are followed by competencies specific to each profession.

This document will go to the ADEA 2023 House of Delegates for approval.

In September 2022, ADEA published the annual summary report titled, Dentists of Tomorrow 2022. The survey report examines the journey of the U.S. dental schools’ predoctoral senior class of 2022, from its influences and motivations to pursue careers in dentistry and the students’ perceptions of their dental school experience to their plans upon graduation and the investment in their careers. For the first time, the analysis examines the preferences and decisions of the senior students by demographic generation, focusing on Generation Z. Whenever feasible, the analysis compares the answers of the 2022 survey respondents with their 2017 counterparts.

Furthermore, this assessment aims to understand the journey of historically underrepresented race and ethnicity (HURE) predoctoral senior students by comparing the responses of the overall other race and ethnic cohorts. This research considers the following four race and ethnicity categories to be part of HURE: non-Hispanic African American, Hispanic or Latino of all races, non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native, and non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. The summary report is available for download, as well as an online storyboard with the charts in an interactive format.

Accompanying the summary report, ADEA published a more extended analysis of the 2022 results in the October 2022 issue of the Journal of Dental Education. This article is accessible by ADEA members at no cost on the JDE website. ADEA will launch the 2023 edition of the U.S. Senior Survey toward the end of the first quarter of 2023

ADEA created individualized reports with the results of each U.S. dental schools’ 2022 ADEA Survey of U.S. Dental School Seniors Survey. A school report compares the results based on the student’s responses at the school with the national results. The reports are available only with the respective school dean’s approval.

After a hiatus of three years, ADEA has been working on redesigning and launching the ADEA Survey of Canadian Dental School Seniors. The survey will ask for feedback from graduating seniors (Class of 2023) in participating institutions on a range of topics, including their background, reasons for pursuing dentistry, preparedness to practice, educational debt, financing their education, plans after graduation, licensure and well-being.

The survey has been redesigned in collaboration with deans at participating Canadian institutions. The survey will be administered in English and French based on the institutions’ geographic location. The data generated from the survey will provide a pulse of graduating senior students’ sentiments on critical topics and inform programmatic and policy decision-making.

ADEA is working with a vendor to build an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-supported research data platform. In June 2022, ADEA Office of Policy and Educational Research (OPER) selected a vendor to implement and support an AWS-based data infrastructure. This was a crucial milestone in the four-year ADEA Research Data Infrastructure project. The vendor will operationalize the proof of concept and processes the ADEA research team designed over the prior six months for the data platform. The project implementation began in July 2022.

In September 2022, the foundation for the research data platform was finalized, including secure databases, file storage, data access and data loading processes. The new infrastructure has already been used to integrate and analyze the 2022 dental school application data and will be used for all data management activities. Beginning in September 2022, the vendor has been working with the OPER staff to migrate, standardize and integrate decades of historical research data about applicants, students, faculty, and dental education programs into the platform.

The project’s first phase is planned to be completed by June 2023. As a result, OPER staff will have a unified, well-documented centralized data storage, with linkage among datasets and years of data. This will allow for more efficient access to high-quality research data, improving OPER’s ability to respond to member requests and conduct its analyses. After the end of this phase, the ADEA research team will work with the vendor to prepare the data platform for direct, curated access for the leadership of member institutions for timely, accurate and valuable data for benchmarking and research purposes.

The ADEA Office of Policy and Educational Research (OPER) compiles comprehensive data annually and publishes an annual report on U.S. Dental School Applicants and Enrollees. The next iteration of the project for the Class of 2022 is underway. The upcoming report will analyze data from the ADEA AADSAS^® (ADEA Associated American Dental Schools Application System) and Texas Medical & Dental Schools Application Services (TMDSAS). An accompanying spreadsheet report will also provide a comprehensive view of applicants to and first-time, first-year enrollees in the 2022 U.S. predoctoral dental school entering class. In 2023, much of the process for generating the data and reports have been migrated to the newly launched AWS-supported research data platform.