Learners benefit more from narrative, specific feedback than from feedback consisting solely of numerical ratings. Our poster presents a brief pilot intervention to increase the useful, high-quality narrative feedback comments written by preceptors. Narrative comment quality can be improved through efforts to educate faculty about the nature and importance of these comments. However, these interventions are often limited by time constraints. The purpose of our pilot is to determine if an intervention requiring little additional time—adding a simple prompt to the student assessment—can improve the quality of narrative feedback comments. We will compare the specificity of responses to the prompt “Please comment on one patient encounter the student had and stands out to you (please try to be as descriptive as possible)” to the previously used prompts “Please comment on the strengths of this student’s performance” and “Please comment on areas that need improvement for this student.” We will rate the specificity of the comments on a three-point scale (specific, moderately specific, not specific). In our pilot study phase (10/2017-10/2018), this additional question was added only to our paper assessment, thereby limiting our data to preceptors who use the paper rather than electronic form. We hypothesize that the new prompt will give us narrative feedback with specific behavioral detail that is useful to the learner and clerkship director.
Upon completion of this session, participants should be able to: