Feeding back to flourish: exploring tools to enhance feedback information, processes, and environment in (bio)medical internships

Feedback is pivotal in student learning during (bio)medical internships. Therefore, (bio)medical programmes offer supervisors and students structured approaches through forms and prompts, which we refer to as feedback tools, to enhance student learning. These tools can aid supervisors in collecting and discussing students’ performance information, support students in processing this information, and potentially help students to impact their feedback environment. Although feedback tools have long been integral to (bio)medical education, much remains unclear about how supervisors and students utilize these tools, particularly in relation to the complex internship environment and the increasingly emphasized proactive role of students.

The thesis investigates three feedback tools, from both the student and supervisor perspectives, used in the studies of Medicine and the Graduate School of Life Sciences at the University Medical Center Utrecht and Utrecht University. Some key findings are that supervisors used feedback tools flexibly, which could threaten the collection of valuable feedback information. Individual students, furthermore, differ in how they process the feedback they receive and how much support they need to be proactive.

The thesis indicates how data from students, supervisors, and particularly assessment provide valuable input to improve feedback tools. It concludes that no ‘one size fits all’ feedback tool exists. We advise educational programmes to determine what is important in a feedback tool. In doing so, they can consider the desired flexibility offered by the instrument and identify who (student, supervisor, program) is responsible for what, to determine the level of proactivity they expect from their students.