Identifying Freshman Student Expectations at the CES University Dentistry Program in Medellín (Colombia)

Abstract

The definition for “expectation” by the Spanish Royal Academy of Language is “the hope to accomplish or achieve a set goal”. In the educational field, the relationship between expectation and satisfaction has been studied from two different, but complementary perspectives - one that focuses on educational quality and the other on the psychological well-being of the student. However, expectation has not been a topic of great interest in the past few years. For this reason, strategies must be created to impact student retention at universities. This study seeks to identify student expectations for first-year dental students at the CES University in Medellín, Colombia based on three cohorts (2017-1, 2017-2 and 2018-1). A quantitative, observational, descriptive and comparative study was conducted using a non-randomized sample of 152 freshman dental students at Medellin´s CES University. The CIA-A questionnaire was validated in Chile using a similar population (first-year medical students). The majority of the responses (72.2%) were provided by females residing in the Medellin metropolitan area with statistically significant differences with regards to origin and previous major. Although the factors analyzed among the cohorts were similar, the 2017-2 cohorts had the highest averages for each of the items. Results revealed that student participation was the component with the highest student expectation and that attributing more value to student participation is a key issue to prevent students from abandoning their studies.