Students studying pre-dental courses are benefiting from a psychometric testing programme on offer from the university counselling service as teaching staff use it to assign them to small groups to maximize their learning. The counselling service is using the Insights programme which assesses personality types to give clients a greater understanding of their strengths and weaknesses as identified by themselves.
In the life sciences teaching unit Dr David Parkin assigns students to small groups according to their personality type to achieve a good personality balance. He explains: "I was looking for a systematic method of assigning students which wasn’t based on alphabetical order.
This is the ideal solution as it ensures there is a good mix of personalities in each group. The students learn to work with people different from themselves, they develop collegiality, working with people they may not like - skills essential for their careers." The programme maps out personal strategies for skills development so students can use the results themselves to improve their own skills and learning.
Dr Nick Halpin from the counselling service says that the data has been remarkably consistent for the last four years. "We have found that there has been the same amount of different personality types in each year suggesting that each large group will have a similar spread of personalities."