| Acknowledging the powerful that role formative feedback plays in learning, students who are training for professions in the clinical setting and learn while working alongside professionals in their field report that they receive limited feedback. Formative feedback helps students gauge progress, identify weaknesses, and improve performance as well as promotes reflection and professional development, which leads toward lifelong learning. Research shows that today's student will most likely use the same methods and tactics when they take on the role of teacher that were used when they were a student; therefore, improving today's instruction has far-reaching implications. To better understand the perspective of those who provide formative feedback, clinical teachers from the imaging fields of nuclear medicine, radiology, and sonography were surveyed to determine what they considered formative feedback, identify how often and what elements of formative feedback they used, and look for any trends between their feedback practices and the attitudes that they held towards students. A questionnaire created for this study that utilized a modified portion of the Feedback Quality Index (M. Fitzgerald & C. Lehmann, Development and Field Pretest of the Feedback Quality Index: A Tool for Assessing Feedback Frequency and Quality in a Clinical Setting," 2011) was self-administered using the teachers' last experience working with students as reference. Using Pearson's chi-square test and the Fisher exact probability test, no significance was found among the variables of imaging modality, years of work experience, and gender in relation to the clinical teachers' formative feedback practices or attitude. |
