Communication Skills of Dentist Faculty Members of Islamic Azad University Based on a Student Survey and its Relation with Faculties Evaluation by Students

Background and purpose: Given the fact that identifying the problems of faculty members improvement are important, we investigated the communication skills of faculty members and examined if here isany association between good communication skill and the scores faculty members get from students evaluation in dental school of Islamic Azad University in Tehran.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the students filled a questionnaire which assessed the communication skill (verbal and non verbal) of faculty members based on a Likert’s type scale ranging from very good, to good, moderate, and poor at two weeks after the beginning of the course.The verbal communication skill were assessed based on 7 factors and the non verbal communication skill were evaluated based on 11 items .These items were extracted from standard communication text for content validity and the reliability was examined through a pilot test-retest procedure withr=0.85. Two weeks before the end of the same semester the students completed the faculties’ evaluation form which included 16 items. The validity and reliability of the faculty evaluation have previouslyestablished.The students selected one choice out of a range of very good, good, moderate, poor for each of the above items. The data were examined for correlation of communication skill with faculty evaluation by students by chi-square test.Results: In this study 1278 students assessed 154 faculty members in 234 class or clinics by completing 9107 questionnaire for communication skill and 9107 from for evaluation of faculty members. Of all participants 55.4% evaluated communication skills of faculty members as good, 31.8% as moderate and 12.8% as poor. Faculties were evaluated as good by 54%, of students, as moderate by 32.8% and as poor by 14.2%. Faculties with higher communication skill scores tend to have higher evaluationscores (p<0.001) Conclusions: It seems that the communication skill of faculty members of Islamic Azad dentistry school is rather good and this result provides a baseline against which the result of any later intervention for improving communication skill can be compared.