Field of medicine: Medical education.

Format: Hardcover book.

Audience: Medical educators.

Purpose: To guide future curriculum change by providing a basic description of enduring trends in medical education.

Content: This book begins with a brief review of emerging curriculum aims and a summary of essential competencies for future physicians. It then discusses current curriculum models, how and where students learn, technology, assessment, continuing education, and educational quality.

Highlights: The sections on technology and curriculum models provide excellent introductions to the field of medical education. The book includes useful graphics, definitions of terms, listings of medical education-related World Wide Web sites, and succinct case presentations that illustrate various curriculum models.

Limitations: Individual chapters and sections provide good overviews, but the logic for the inclusion or exclusion of certain topics (such as service-based learning in hospital medicine and the cognitive processes of physicians) is not always apparent. Because there are few examples and little discussion of trends that particularly affect medical education in the United States (such as managed care and its effect on academic health centers), the book may be more useful in other countries. Chapters vary in the expected knowledge level of the reader, layout, and the use of internal summaries and graphics.

Related reading: Medical Education in the Millenium provides a broad-based overview of key topics in medical education in the 1990s in a single source. Much of what it presents is available in the existing literature but is not as easily accessible there. For example, the chapter "How Students Learn" provides brief summaries of learning theories, several of which were published in detailed reports in Academic Medicine in 1997, but it also covers the basic principles of and proposes a model for effective learning.

Reviewer: Deborah E. Simpson, PhD, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.