Many educational institutions have moved toward situated learning and problem-based learning (PBL) in which students, to learn, must rely on investigations of problems within an authentic professional context. A study examined and described how students read and learn in such a context. Results of a 1995 qualitative study showed that four out of six medical students were not using efficient strategies to read and learn in this context; to explore these findings in more depth another study was conducted in 1997. Research objectives were to describe the different strategies--encoding/retrieval, reading, metacognitive, and resources managing--used by medical students as they learn in a PBL program; and to explore the relationship between the strategies used and knowledge acquired. Subjects, third-year medical students, must first use their prior knowledge to analyze the problem; then they must read texts on the subject to complete their knowledge; and finally they must organize all the information into a conceptual map. Those three tasks combine to create a context that sustains purposeful learning. Research protocol is descriptive and data were collected from the two aforementioned studies. For the group as a whole, half the strategies used were of metacognitive nature, and encoding/retrieval and reading strategies were equally used (24% and 26%). In reading, more strategies for reading text were used than working on ideas. In encoding/retrieval, strategies used were repetition, selection, elaboration, organization, and notetaking in descending order of frequency. For metacognitive strategies, evaluation was found twice as often as planning and monitoring. As for resource managing strategies, students used a reference book for a third of the time. (NKA)