Assessment of clinical skills is a critical element of undergraduate medical education. We compare a traditional approach to procedural skills assessment--the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) with the Integrated Performance Procedural Instrument (IPPI). In both approaches, students work through "stations" or…

After Phnom Penh was liberated from the Khmer Rouge in 1979, health science education in Cambodia had to be completely rebuilt. In this article, the authors report the results of a teaching collaboration between the University of Melbourne (Australia), the International University (Cambodia), and the University of Health Sciences (Cambodia). The…

Teaching pharmacology to medical students has long been seen as a challenge, and one to which a number of innovative approaches have been taken. In this article, we describe and evaluate the use of primary research articles in teaching second-year medical students both in terms of the information learned and the use of the papers themselves. We…

Objective: The authors studied the regularity and content of supervision sessions in one of the U.K. postgraduate psychiatric training schemes (Mid-Trent). Methods: A questionnaire sent to psychiatry trainees assessed the timing and duration of supervision, content and protection of supervision time, and overall quality of supervision. The authors…

Teachers of first-year medical students identified possible reasons for poor performance. This exposed several beliefs about students. These beliefs were tested by comparing student attitudes with their exam performance. The findings question most of the teachers' beliefs. There does appear to be a link between exam performance and two factors:…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of selection, educational background, age and gender on strength of motivation to attend and pursue medical school. Graduate entry (GE) medical students (having Bachelor's degree in Life Sciences or related field) and Non-Graduate Entry (NGE) medical students (having only completed high school),…

Objective: The authors review the literature about educational programs for teaching sexual history-taking skills and describe novel techniques for teaching these skills. Methods: Psychiatric residents enrolled in a brief sexual history-taking course that included instruction on the Sexual Events Classification System, feedback on residents'…

This study reports on the career intentions of 179 final year medical students who completed an online survey that included measures of personality, values, professional and lifestyle expectations, and well-being. Logistic regression analyses identified the determinants of preferred medical specialty, practice location and hours of work.…

Having performed research using approaches to learning and studying inventories and become familiar with the concepts they purport to measure, the authors were concerned that existing inventories might not capture the full range of "intentions" and "motivations" for learning that exist within populations of medical students. We used…

Patients' receptivity towards medical student participation has been examined predominantly from the patient and/or the medical student perspective. Few studies have investigated the preceptor's perspective. The study examined preceptors' experience with patients declining medical student participation in clinical care and identified…

Previous studies have shown that anatomy students who complete oral laboratory presentations believe they understand the material better and retain it longer than they otherwise would if they only took examinations on the material; however, we have found no studies that empirically test such outcomes. The purpose of this study was to assess the…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the practicality of implementing a peer-teaching program in a large class (more than 350 students) of medical students and whether such a program is beneficial. Case-based problems were developed by faculty members to facilitate student problem solving and discussion. Voluntary student enrollment was…

Historically, medical education has focused largely on medical students' intellectual development, mostly ignoring the broader psychological milieu of medical practice. This chasm can result in practitioners who are less likely to process their emotions and/or support their patient's needs, and more likely to experience burnout. Self-determination…

Objective: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the largest single provider of medical education in the United States and is often the preferred training site for medical students and residents. However, changing priorities of patients and the marketplace are forcing medical schools and the VA to consider new ways of practicing medicine…

In this paper, an extended teaching implication is performed based on the study of medical students' linguistic needs in Tawian (Hwang, Lin, 2010). The aims of previous study were to provide a description of the linguistic needs and perceptions of medical students and faculty members in Taiwan. However, this paper put more thoughts on the…