Message from the 2010 Program Chair

Susan J. Pasquale

Poster Abstracts of the 14th IAMSE Annual Meeting
New Orleans, July 10-13, 2010

Welcome to the research proceedings from the 2010 IAMSE Annual Meeting. IAMSE promotes the teaching and educational scholarship of the sciences basic to medicine, and its members work throughout the year to further this aim via webcast seminars, the associationā€™s online journal, colleague-to-colleague mentorship, and the annual meeting.

The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of IAMSE took place from July 10-13 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Close to 200 colleagues from 20 different countries registered for this annual conference on teaching medical sciences. The program of the IAMSE 2010 meeting was interesting and challenging. Three internationally known keynote speakers and three platform presenters spoke about the state of the art in the field of teaching and learning, technology, curriculum development, and assessment. Stewart Mennin (Brazil) introduced the audience to Complexity Science and the way it can be used to help students learn in a complex world. James McGee (USA) talked about ways in which faculty can optimally prepare to teach Millennial Generation Learners. Finally Lambert Schuwirth (The Netherlands) spoke about the future of assessment in which assessment for learning will be more important than assessment of learning. Furthermore, in 35 sessions and almost 90 poster presentations, meeting participants shared their expertise and ideas with others.

At this IAMSE meeting, the winners of the prestigious Master Scholar Award and Master Teacher Award have been announced. Both awards recognize an IAMSE member who has a distinguished record of educational scholarship, including educational research and/or dissemination of excellent and scholarly approaches to teaching and education. More details are presented further on in this issue. Also, Vaughan Kippers (Australia) received the IAMSE Fellowship Award for completing the ESME Certificate Program and the IAMSE Fellowship Program. The ESME program (Essential Skills in Medical Education) is accredited by AMEE and approved by an international advisory board. It has been designed around a set of competencies that all practicing teachers should possess. Dr Kippers is the first graduate from this combined faculty development program.

This issue of JIAMSE will give readers an opportunity to review a brief overview of the keynote lectures and the abstracts of the posters and E-demos, including contributions of the recipients of the Outstanding Poster Awards. I encourage you to take some time to review the wealth of valuable information presented in this issue of the journal, and hope that you will join us at a future meeting.

Susan J. Pasquale, Ph.D., MT-BC, NMT
Chair of the 2010 Program Committee