Assessing the assessors: investigating the process of marking essays.

Pressure for accountability, transparency, and consistency of the assessment process is increasing. For assessing complex cognitive achievements, essays are probably the most familiar method, but essay scoring is notoriously unreliable. To address issues of assessment process, accountability, and consistency, this study explores essay marking practice amongst examiners in a UK dental school using a qualitative approach.

An evaluation of the use of caries risk/susceptibility assessment in an undergraduate dental curriculum.

Unlabelled: There has been a paradigm shift in patient care with regards to delivering better oral health, towards a team-delivered, person-focused, risk-related model that is known as minimum intervention oral care (MIOC). Student skills should be developed within the undergraduate dental curricula to ensure that graduating dentists and other oral healthcare team members are able to provide phased personalised care plans alongside behavioural management support to patients/caregivers to prevent and manage oral disease in the long term. The purpose of this study is to establish that using an adjunctive caries risk/susceptibility assessment (CRSA) technology (PreViser) had an impact on the behaviour, perception, and knowledge of dental undergraduate students and their clinical teachers, regarding the benefits of such an oral health assessment in the management of patients.

Mechanisms of action of environmental factors--tobacco smoking.

Aim: To review the potential biological mechanisms underlying the effects of tobacco smoking on periodontitis.

Main Findings: Smoking has major effects on the host response, but there are also a number of studies that show some microbiological differences between smokers and non-smokers. Smoking has a long-term chronic effect on many important aspects of the inflammatory and immune responses.

Prevention of mucosally induced uveitis with a HSP60-derived peptide linked to cholera toxin B subunit.

Oral administration of the uveitogenic peptide (aa 336-351) derived from human HSP60 induced clinical and histological manifestations of uveitis in 65.8% (48/73) of Lewis rats. Uveitis was significantly decreased to 16.