Affecting Change: Enhancing Feedback Interactions with Radiology Trainees

Use of Effective Feedback in Veterinary Clinical Teaching

“…Feedback is a purposeful, interactive and supportive discussion between the learner and instructor within a context and a culture. The aims of the feedback are assisting the learner in reducing the gap in their competencies [2,5,6,10,11,15,[19][20][21][26][27][28][29][30] and also improving the teaching of the instructor [31,32]. Feedback is accepted as being a keystone of the learning circle (Figure 1) and is important for decreasing the heavy workload in curricula [33].…”

“…Indeed, improvements in competencies of the learner are only possible when the feedback is effective (Figure 1) [15,25,28,[35][36][37]. With the aim of enhancing the learner's competencies, feedback must be offered in a constructive manner, using descriptive rather than evaluative language, in addition to being Specific, Thoughtful, Actionable, Timely, Individual and Criterion-referenced (mnemonic STATIC) [3,5,15,19,35] or specific, timely, objective/observed, and planned for improvement (mnemonic STOP) [38]. The previous specific, thoughtful, actionable, and timely (STAT) format of effective feedback [16] lacks tailoring to the learner benefits.…”

“…Historically, feedback has been instructor-centered with the instructor passing a message to the learner [18,19,26,34,47]. In the past 2-3 decades, as a result of changes in social interactions, the feedback has become an interactive, supportive discussion between learner and instructor as part of the 'feedback culture', aiming to stimulate self-reflection, deep learning, and the learners taking responsibility for their own learning [2,18,19,26,32,34,38,49,50]. These are steps ensuring the learner is prepared for life-long learning.…”

“…Although feedback may be carried out in conjunction with assessment, effective feedback should be used both continuously (on-going) and scheduled (periodic), and not reflective of an assessment performance only. Ideally, feedback should be a formative task (related to assessment for learning), rather than a summative (related to assessment of learning) task [2,15,19,38,47,48]. Properly executed, feedback should be providing information on competencies rather than giving a summative score without information accompanying it Historically, feedback has been instructor-centered with the instructor passing a message to the learner [18,19,26,34,47].…”

“…Further, it should be realized that bi-directional feedback is a great facilitator in the development of instructors [17]. Medical and veterinary education accrediting processes recognize feedback as essential to the development of the learner (e.g., in medical education, the CBME (competency-based medical education) through accrediting bodies, such as Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) [10,[18][19][20][21][22]; in veterinary medical education, the CBVME (competency-based veterinary medical education) [12,23] and EAEVE (European Association of Establishments for Veterinary Education) [24] through accrediting bodies, such as VSACC (Veterinary Schools Accreditation Advisory Committee), for Australasia). To assist in learner development, the provided feedback should be effective, of high quality and standardized across instructors and time [9,13].…”