Medical case teaching on the web.

Background: Little is known about strategies for developing teaching cases and strategies for identifying design features that optimize a learner's interactions with Web-based cases.

Purposes: We examined design features in Web cases that facilitated interactive and engaging learning.

Methods: Nine collaborators reviewed selected Web cases and documented the presence of features that facilitate interactive learning, including opportunities for information gathering, decision making, and receiving feedback.

A new oral health elective for medical students at the University of Washington.

Background: Oral health is an important but inadequately addressed area in medical school curricula. Primary care practitioners are in an ideal position to help prevent oral disease but lack the knowledge to do so.

Purposes: We developed an oral health elective that targeted 1st- and 2nd-year medical students as part of a previously described oral health initiative and oral health curriculum.

The evolution of a required research program for medical students at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

The concepts and tools clinicians use to understand disease and treat patients are the direct product of basic and applied scientific inquiry. To prepare physicians to participate in this tradition of medical science, the University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM) created a research requirement in 1981. The objective was to provide students, during their clinical years of medical school, with first-hand experience in hypothesis-driven inquiry and an understanding of the philosophies and methods of science integral to the practice of medicine.