Study 2: Students and Clinical Teachers’ Experiences About Productive Feedback Practices in the Clinical Workplace from a Sociocultural Perspective

For feedback to be productive, it relies on the interactions of participants, design elements, and resources. Yet, complexities in clinical education pose challenges for feedback practices in students and teachers, and efforts to improve feedback often ignore the influence of culture and context. A recent sociocultural approach to feedback practices recognized three layers to understand the complexity of productive feedback: the encounter layer, the design layer, and the knowledge layer. This study explores the sociocultural factors that influence productive feedback practices in clinical settings from the dyad clinical teacher-student perspective.
A cross-sectional qualitative study in a physiotherapy clerkship involved semi-structured interviews with ten students and eight clinical educators. Convenience sampling was used, and participation was voluntary. Employing a sociocultural perspective through thematic analysis, the study examined feedback practices across the three layers of feedback.
The analysis yielded different elements along the three layers that enable productive feedback practices in the clinical workplace: (1) Feedback encounter layer: dyad relationships, mutual trust, continuity of supervision, and dialogue.; (2) Feedback design layer: enabled learning opportunities and feedback scaffolding; (3) Knowledge domain layer in the clinical culture: Growing clinical experience and accountability.
In the context of undergraduate clinical education, productive feedback practices are shaped by social-cultural factors. Designing feedback practices should consciously integrate these components, such as cultivating relationships, fostering guidance, enhancing feedback agency, and enabling supervised autonomy to promote productive feedback.
The attached files are the code list used for the thematic analysis and the full qualitative results report.<BR><BR>