Ethical and moral development: aspects relating to professional training in Dentistry

ABSTRACT Objective: To assess the progression of a public university's dental students through stages of moral development during the course. Methods: A cross-sectional study with 115 students (from the 1st to the 7th semester), to whom the "Opiniões sobre problemas sociais" test, adapted and translated to the Portuguese language, was applied. Results: The collected answers were charted according to the test manual's guidelines and data were analyzed by the GraphPad Prism software 6.0 and STATA v.13. Principal morality score values, expressed as a P value (%), were 40.26%; 39.32%; 36.45% and 36.27% for the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th semesters, respectively, with no statistically significant difference between the groups (ANOVA, p = 0.52). Conclusion: Students' degrees of morality did not vary significantly among the semesters compared, indicating the need for a reorientation of teaching-learning practices that takes the potential of transformative learning into account.