A new approach to undergraduate dental education.

As a result of a growing awareness that the traditional undergraduate curriculum for dental students was overloaded with facts to the detriment of producing dentists skilled in problem-solving and critical thinking, the Faculty of Dentistry of the University of Pretoria was prompted to review the curriculum, teaching methodology and the evaluation of students performance. After much deliberation and planning, it was decided to construct a new curriculum which could support problem-oriented learning, with all its many advantages. The themes of this new curriculum are derived from an analysis of the so-called "clinical reasoning process" and its relationship to the spectrum of relevant diseases. Finally, an example of a clinical problem, which the dental students are expected to solve, is described to illustrate how the educational and training needs are determined.