January 2012 ■ Journal of Dental Education 107 Dental Education’s Involvement with Dentists ’ Learning in Practice: Data and Theory

Abstract: A careful reading of the Journal of Dental Education from its founding in 1936 and of the Proceedings of the American Association of Dental Schools (the predecessor of the American Dental Education Association) from 1924, as well as other docu-ments, allows us to describe the role dental schools have played in supporting the learning of dentists following graduation from formal programs. This article is in two parts. First, data are presented showing the emergence of continuing dental education in the 1960s and its continual growth. The exception to this pattern is that dental schools shared in the initial bloom but experienced an inexorable decline beginning in the 1980s. In the second part, it is shown that scholarship regarding how dentists learn over multiple settings and as they acquire greater mastery of their discipline has also failed to develop. Reasons are given for both phe-nomena, reasons that include competitive external factors and point to intrinsic weaknesses in the scholarship of dental education