Standard teaching techniques in health care often contain traditional didactic elements. Learning from traditional didactic teaching has never been a very active process and can subsequently be tedious and tiring. In this review we wished to investigate the effects of more interactive ways of teaching mental health professionals. We identified one relevant trial which, although very small and short, did suggest quite a considerable short term positive effect for the more interactive teaching approach. On average, mental health nursing students who had been taught using this method scored six points more in a follow-up test than students allocated to the standard teaching techniques.
This interesting experiment should be reproduced to determine whether the increased knowledge is sustained and, if so, whether this produces better skills and attitudes.