Undergraduate psychiatry students' attitudes towards teaching methods at an Irish university

Background: At University College Dublin, teaching in psychiatry includes clinical electives, lectures, small-group and problem-based teaching, consistent with international trends.
Aims: To determine final-year psychiatry students’ attitudes towards teaching methods.
Methods: We distributed questionnaires to all final-year medical students in two classes (2008 and 2009), after final psychiatry examination (before results) and all of them participated (n = 111). Results: Students’ interest in psychiatry as a career increased during psychiatry teaching. Students rated objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) as the most useful element of teaching and examination. The most common learning style was 'reflector'; the least common was 'pragmatist'. Two thirds believed teaching could be improved (increased patient contact) and 89 % reported that experience of psychiatry changed attitudes towards mental illness (increased understanding). Conclusions: Students’ preference for OSCEs may reflect the closeness of OSCE as a form of learning to OSCE as a form of assessment: OSCEs both focus on specific clinical skills and help prepare for examinations. Future research could usefully examine the extent to which these findings are university-specific or instructor-dependent. Information on the consistency of various teaching, examination and modularisation methods would also be useful.