Written feedback on supervised learning events.

BACKGROUND

Medical students value constructive feedback, as it helps them to improve their performance. Supervised learning events (SLEs) were developed as performance assessments and to create opportunities for students to receive feedback. Although many would argue the strengths of SLEs, there is a lack of literature assessing the quality of written feedback for medical students.

METHOD

A random sample of Year 4 students at a London medical school provided a total of 250 SLE forms for analysis. A coding framework was developed and applied to the sample to grade the quality of the feedback.

RESULTS

Overall, 63.1 per cent of feedback entries were graded weak. More of the 'areas for improvement' comments were graded weak (73.6%) compared with the 'points of good performance' (52.8%). Of the feedback graded weak, many were left blank (40.6%), were non-specific (34.1%), only used words such as 'keep practising' (19.5%), were irrelevant (4.6%) or were illegible (1.2%).

CONCLUSION

The quality of written feedback is clearly an area for development. Factors that impede this include a lack of time and the fact that some assessors may be uncomfortable providing negative feedback. In order to improve, it is important that both students and assessors are trained more thoroughly in giving effective written feedback. The quality of written feedback is clearly an area for development.