Identifying strategies to enhance Feedback Engagement in Healthcare and Medical Education

About the Project

Background

Feedback is widely recognised as critical for learning, yet students often struggle to interpret. When feedback is poorly understood, it can lead to disengagement, reduced confidence, and missed opportunities for improvement, particularly for students from widening participation backgrounds.

These challenges are particularly evident in healthcare education, where faculty members are increasingly expected to support students in making sense of feedback despite operating at a distance from the original assessment process. For example, in OSCEs and other centrally coordinated assessments, tutors working with student to understand and forward plan following feedback, may struggle to interpret feedback they did not produce and coach students on events they did not observe. Similarly, in knowledge-based assessments, those assisting students often have no direct role in the organisation, question writing process, delivery, marking and/or psychometric evaluation of the assessment. This disconnect can create gaps in learning and hinder remediation efforts.

Research Gap

While feedback literacy and dialogic feedback approaches have gained attention, current research rarely explores how third-party feedback conversations, where tutors are not the original assessors, impact student engagement and learning outcomes in healthcare education. There is limited evidence on structured approaches that enable these conversations to be effective and meaningful. Addressing this gap is essential to strengthen feedback culture and improve student success.

Aims

The aims of this project are to (1) Identify barriers and facilitators to effective feedback engagement in healthcare education from both student and faculty perspectives (2) develop and evaluate structured feedback interventions that enable Personal Academic Tutors (PATs) and faculty—who are not the original assessors—to conduct meaningful feedback conversations that help students interpret and act on assessment feedback and (3) generate evidence-based recommendations to strengthen feedback culture, improve student engagement, and enhance academic performance across healthcare education settings.

Applicants may consider these factors in specific student groups, or may choose to focus on the delivery of feedback in a specific subject area.

Supervisory Team

• Director of Studies:Rebecca Stack, Professor of Student Success and Medical Assessment, Three Counties Medical School
• Supervisors: Dr Julie Cooke, Senior Lecturer in Nursing
• Research Group: Health Professions Education and Practice