Double duty, shared responsibilities and feedback literacy
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Perspect Med Educ https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-020-00599-9
Double duty, shared responsibilities and feedback literacy David Carless
© The Author(s) 2020
Burm et al. designed and implemented an innovation focused on training and deploying medical personnel from one specialism to assess surgical trainees in another specialism [1]. A major finding from the focus group interview data was that learners questioned the credibility of the feedback providers and the constructiveness of the feedback messages. It seemed that learners desired more than an assessment of their competence, they wanted to see how their performance could be improved. For this to transpire, they felt they needed specialist advice from someone who had done similar operations many times before. As an educational researcher specializing in assessment and feedback, I find much to learn from varied traditions, cultures and perspectives offered by different disciplines. Whilst there are useful generic principles of assessment and feedback, tensions and compromises between generic and discipline-specific features of assessment and feedback practice loom large. There are learning cultures and feedback cultures at the heart of disciplinary practices [2]. A major challenge for assessment practice is that assessment always does double duty [3]: it needs to fulfil multiple functions. Most commonly, and relevant to the contribution of Burm et al., assessment needs to provide a fair appraisal of current achievement whilst at the same time contributing to ongoing development of the individual being assessed. Feedback information also does double duty [4]. Its functions include: justifying the grade awarded; offering commentary that may be helpful on future tasks; and providing an audit trail for quality assurance purposes. Feedback doing double duty seems D. Carless () Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China [email protected]
highly pertinent to the Burm et al. paper. Learners seemed to want a coach who could support them in advancing their skills but instead they got an assessor who scored their performance. A checklist reinforced this mismatch by itemizing in a procedural way rather than facilitating nuanced feedback interactions. Authentic feedback in medical education might, for example, profitably involve physical demonstration of manual procedures [5]. Feedback exchanges often fail as communication because participants are on different wavelengths. Double duty confounds the difficulties of shared interpretations. Communication and negotiation of goals can minimize misunderstandings and conflicting agendas but need those elusive elements of time, space and longer-term relationships. The challenges of communication reinforce the social and relational elements of feedback processes. In the section ‘Fostering the feedback alliance’, Burm et al. raise some important issues around relationships and trust. The learners seemed most to crave, ‘competence trust’ [6, 7], a perception that the interlocutor has the capability to provide usefu
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