Abstract
BackgroundIn this research paper we report on the quality of feedback provided in the logbooks of pre-clinical undergraduate students based on a model of ‘actionable feedback’. Feedback to clinical learners about their performance is crucial to their learning, which ultimately impacts on their development into competent clinicians. Due to students’ concerns regarding the inconsistency and quality of feedback provided by clinicians, a structured feedback improvement strategy to move feedback forward was added to the clinical skills logbook. The instrument was also extended for peer assessment. This study aims to assess the quality of feedback using the deliberate practice framework.MethodsA feedback scoring system was used to retrospectively assess the quality of tutor and peer logbook feedback provided to second and third year medical students to identify deliberate practice components i.e. task, performance gap and action plan. The sample consisted of 425 second year and 600 third year feedback responses over a year.ResultsAll three deliberate practice components were observed in the majority of the written feedback for both classes. The frequency was higher in peer (83%, 89%) than tutor logbook assessments (51%, 67%) in both classes respectively. Average tutor and peer task, gap and action feedback scores ranged from 1.84–2.07 and 1.93–2.21 respectively. The overall quality of feedback provided by the tutor and peer was moderate and less specific (average score < or = 2). The absence of the three components was noted in only 1% of the feedback responses in both 2nd and 3rd year.ConclusionThis study found that adding in a feed-forward strategy to the logbooks increased the overall quality of tutor and peer feedback as the task, gap and action plans were described. Deliberate practice framework provides an objective assessment of tutor and peer feedback quality and can be used for faculty development and training. The findings from our study suggest that the ratings from the tool can also be used as guidelines to provide feedback providers with feedback on the quality of feedback they provided. This includes specifically describing a task, performance gap and providing a learning plan as feed-forward to enhance feedback given.
Highlights
In this research paper we report on the quality of feedback provided in the logbooks of pre-clinical undergraduate students based on a model of ‘actionable feedback’
Using Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice, a key component of expertise development, this study aims to evaluate the quality of written feedback provided to pre-clinical undergraduate medical students in the clinical skills laboratory during formative logbook assessments following the feedback improvement intervention
The introduction of a feedback improvement strategy to the logbooks increased the quality of the feedback provided as the task, gap and action plans were all included
Summary
In this research paper we report on the quality of feedback provided in the logbooks of pre-clinical undergraduate students based on a model of ‘actionable feedback’. Apart from developing different assessment tasks to accomplish this shift, there is likewise a need to change the manner in which students are informed about the learning evaluation results (feedback) and how to make decisions from these results (feed-forward) [5, 6, 26]. Studies have described both feedback process [7,8,9,10] and content [3, 10, 11] as important factors for improved clinical performance. The use of these factors to assess the quality of feedback is less common [5]
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