The curriculum: overloaded and too general?

Two educational implications of the prototype view of categorization of medical disorders in the long-term memory of medical students are tested: first, that categories are better learned when the initial exposure is through representative exemplars, the prototypes as opposed to the whole range of instances; second, that concepts are initially learned at an intermediate level of abstraction (e.g. angina pectoris), corresponding to the prototypes, as opposed to more general levels (e.g. coronary disorders). In a group of third-year medical students (n = 42) taken from a previous study, the recall frequencies of undergraduate course materials in eight system courses are inversely related to the number of disorders presented, r(6) = -0.58, P = 0.06. The recall frequencies are highest for courses with the highest proportion of intermediate-level materials, r(6) = 0.73, P = 0.02. The implications of these results for curriculum design are discussed.