Six education strategies have been identified relating to the curriculum in a medical school. Each issue can be represented as a spectrum or continuum: student-centred/teacher-centred, problem-based/information-gathering, integrated/discipline-based, community-based/hospital-based, elective/uniform and systematic/apprenticeship-based. The factors supporting a more towards each end of the continuum are presented for each strategy. Newer schools tend to be more to the left on the continuum, established schools more to the right. Each school, however, has to decide where it stands on each issue and to establish its own profile. This SPICES model of curriculum strategy analysis can be used in curriculum planning or review, in tackling problems relating to the curriculum and in providing guidance relating to teaching methods and assessment.

No abstract

This article investigates the effect on learning of adjunct aids accompanying printed text. The adjunct aids used are illustrations and questions. While there is considerable experimental literature on the effect of adjunct aids on learning from printed text and while this literature is generally affirmative, there is little experimentation either on the effect of these aids accompanying medical text or on the additive effect of these aids. This article shows that the use of adjunct illustrations can facilitate learning of specifiable information in the text but that there is a plateau effect on learning where more than one aid is used. The implications of these results are discussed for the design of instructional text. Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Monash University on 11/02/14 For personal use only. Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Monash University on 11/02/14 For personal use only.