One of the most important things to the AES team is hearing requests and feedback from teachers like you. Your comments and ideas help guide us when building out the curriculum roadmap.
On occasion, teachers ask if we have anything in the works for dental assisting. There are limited resources out there for dental assisting programs, so we understand why you’re asking about it!
While some teachers use AES as a supplement in their dentistry classes, our curriculum doesn’t include content specific to dental assisting.
In this article, you'll learn why we don't currently provide dental curriculum and where to find resources to teach your dental assisting classes.
Why Doesn’t AES Have Dental Assisting Curriculum?
Watch this video to learn the factors we consider when planning your curriculum roadmap, or continue reading below:
While thinking about empowering lifelong learners and saving teachers time, we focus our time, energy, and money on curriculum that will have the greatest impact on teachers and students.
On average, it costs AES $5,000-$7,000 to develop one hour of curriculum content. So if we add 100 hours of new curriculum, that will cost $500,000-$700,000 to produce.
Because development dollars aren’t endless, we prioritize curriculum projects based on both teacher requests and enrollment numbers for health science courses and certification exams. This gives us guidance on what curriculum topics will be most beneficial for the largest group of teachers and students.
When researching enrollment in CTE dental assisting courses, we reviewed information from many states, including Texas and Florida. Here’s what we discovered:
In Texas, 150,000 students are enrolled in Principles of Health Science and Anatomy and Physiology. On the other hand, there is minimal enrollment in dental programs in Texas, as far as we can find.
In Florida, more than 71,000 students are enrolled in CTE health science programs, and less than 5% of those students are enrolled in dental programs across the state.
So when comparing two options, such as new anatomy and physiology content versus dental assisting content, our priority is focused on what will have the biggest impact for the most teachers and students in CTE health science programs.
That’s why AES provides curriculum for areas like introduction to health science, anatomy and physiology, medical assisting, nurse assisting, and patient care technician over more specialized careers in healthcare.
Where Can I Find Dental Assisting Curriculum?
So now you know why we don’t provide dental assisting curriculum. But we don’t want to leave you hanging!
Click below to discover popular dental assisting textbooks we hear about from teachers like you: