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The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the learning outcomes expressed in the core medical curriculum at a Swedish university and how these were interpreted by, and related to, teachers' teaching goals. Additionally, we wanted to find out how these teaching goals relate to the development of expertise, a key value in medical education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers in anatomy and surgery, which is taught in the first and fourth years of the medical programme. To be implemented, a curriculum has to be interpreted by teachers, and this can lead to a mismatch between curriculum intentions and teacher goals. Hence, it is necessary to provide guidance as to whether the application of a core curriculum should be focusing on content only or include socio-cultural ideas of learning encouraging an emphasis on process. The degree of teacher involvement in the design of the core curriculum seems to clarify the role of the core curriculum to teachers and students and certify its actuality and relationship to other courses.

Interactive Simulated Patient (ISP) is a computer-based simulation tool designed to provide medical students with the opportunity to practice their clinical problem solving skills. The ISP system allows students to perform most clinical decision-making procedures in a simulated environment, including history taking in natural language, many hundreds of laboratory tests (e.g., images and endoscopy), and physical examination procedures. The system has been evaluated in a number of courses at three universities, Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University in Sweden, and Stanford University in the United States. This article describes a study conducted in 2002, with an emphasis on results that pertain to collaboration between students. Results indicate that ISP is engaging and stimulates more active student involvement than traditional paper-based case presentation methods and that students seem to collaborate more easily when using ISP compared to traditional paper-based methods.