Soliciting feedback on the wards: a peer‐to‐peer workshop

Abstract

Background: For medical students, soliciting feedback is a critical but difficult skill that merits proper training. This skill may be taught effectively by peers who have experienced challenges with feedback on the wards. Methods: Two medical students developed and taught a workshop on feedback skills. The workshop was presented to 248 third-year students. The workshop trained students in soliciting, receiving and responding to feedback through interactive discussions of case scenarios. Students were given pre-and post-surveys to assess changes in their "… the most common barriers to soliciting feedback that participants cited were time constraints, skills and emotions in asking for feedback, fear of negative feedback, and student-mentor relationship"

An educational intervention to increase student engagement in feedback

“…Our findings are consistent with previous studies (Bing-You et al 1998;Milan et al 2011;Noble et al 2020;Yau et al 2020) that demonstrate it is possible through educational interventions to change student perceptions of their role in feedback. Further, our study has shown that this can lead to behaviour change (increased feedback-seeking) and improved feedback experience (increased feedback received and increased satisfaction).…”

“…Following the workshop, we demonstrated a marked improvement in the frequency of feedback-seeking by students, accompanied by increased receipt of feedback and increased satisfaction with feedback. Increased student intention to seek feedback has been reported following education (Yau et al 2020). To our knowledge, only one other study has demonstrated an increase in actual feedback-seeking (Milan et al 2011), however, changes in frequency of, and satisfaction with, feedback received were not measured in that study.…”

“…Lack of continuity is one of many contextual issues in the health workplace learning environment that may threaten students' agentic capacity within the alliance. Other factors include the availability of clinical teachers (Hoffman and Donaldson 2004;Dolmans et al 2008;Yau et al 2020), the availability of clinical cases (Hoffman and Donaldson 2004), student numbers (Dolmans et al 2008) and learning culture (Bowen et al 2017;Urquhart et al 2018). As Billett (2006) and Bandura (2001) describe, the interplay between learner agency and environmental context is bidirectional, complex and dynamic.…”

“…A brief (minutes long) instructional session on feedback failed to change student willingness to seek feedback (Boehler et al 2006). A peer-to-peer feedback workshop focussing on asking, receiving and responding to feedback resulted in students reporting increased confidence and likelihood to seek feedback, however, behaviour change was not assessed (Yau et al 2020). One study of feedback attitudes before and after a role-play-based workshop showed an improvement in students' perceived effectiveness at seeking feedback, however, results for the postworkshop group were the same as the control group, which did not receive the workshop (Bing-You et al 1998).…”

<p>Receiving Real-Time Clinical Feedback: A Workshop and OSTE Assessment for Medical Students</p>

“…6,9,10 Previously published studies describing workshops targeted to the feedback recipient have reported subjective measures of improvement, including increased confidence and frequency in feedback-seeking behaviors, but did not include any objective measures of performance in demonstrating how to effectively receive feedback. [11][12][13][14][15] While the majority of the current published literature primarily has focused on faculty development of the feedback provider in delivering feedback, [16][17][18] we directed our attention to the learner (feedback recipient). Our workshop addressed simple strategies for effectively receiving feedback, targeted to medical students just prior to the start of their first clinical clerkship.…”