ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DAVID HUGHES ET AL. (Surgery, Medical School) won the Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize in 2016 for their project, Debriefing Students’ Clinical Skills With the Minute Feedback System.
When cutting into a human body, surgery students and their supervisors appropriately focus their full attention on the patient. Providing high quality feedback on a student’s performance in the moment is understandably a lower priority. But if there is no mechanism for pursuing feedback after the fact, the teachable moment evaporates, impeding learning and frustrating students, administrators, and faculty.
Using Qualtrics survey software, the Minute Feedback System makes it quick and easy for students to request feedback on a specific aspect of their clinical care via the web. The process is intended to take less than one minute for each party. After a student completes a brief survey, Qualtrics emails a link to the feedback giver where they can assess the student’s skills on a five-point scale and write (or dictate) a sentence or two. (Images of screens seen by residents and clinicians are shown below.)
Between July 2015 and February 2016, nearly 200 students participated, and they received over 2,000 unique feedback comments about their clinical skills from surgical residents and faculty. Reports of responses downloaded from Qualtrics have also guided clerkship directors in planning professional development sessions that increase the effectiveness of instructors’ feedback giving skills.
Student Comments
“It took approximately 30 seconds to fill out the form and submit it to the reviewer, and about the same amount of time for the reviewer to give me the feedback.”
“I was able to solicit and review feedback within a number of hours to days after working with a given preceptor.”
“By receiving feedback immediately, instead of at the midpoint or end of the clerkship, I found I progressed at a much faster rate.”
“I got more concise and valuable feedback in a shorter amount of time.”
“The online system allowed preceptors to add links or name other resource recommendations, which would otherwise be more tedious to convey through verbal feedback.”
“The app facilitated practical feedback on improving in particular competencies.”
“The app enables students to elicit good quality feedback without feeling like a burden.”
“A simple feedback system, accessible through the email inbox, makes it easy to provide responses quickly.”
