The role of feedback in clinical education: Principles, strategies, and models

Feedback is an inseparable and integral part of learning. It promotes student's learning towards achieving goals. In the training of health professions, little feedback or a paucity of feedback can be observed. Giving correct feedback is another important matter that must be taken into account. Therefore, the aim of this study was to present the principles of feedback, its effective characteristics, the strategies, and models of feedback.
In order to identify the relevant articles, online databases as Elsevier, Google Scholar, SID, and Magiran were searched using keywords such as feedback, clinical evaluation, clinical education, and feedback models were used. About Persian articles, the year of 1385, and Latin articles the year of 2000 have been considered as a base year. Totally, 49 articles were met the review potentiality. 34 articles were identified as relevant ones and included in the study as well as 15 papers were excluded due to being irrelevant.
Feedback must be considered as one of the most important tenets of clinical education like an agent for reflection and improvement. Feedback will be considered effective when it is intended as a certain period in education and its principles and characteristics will be considered and presented with appropriate strategies and models. If feedback is provided in an appropriate manner and with suitable information, the performance of the learner can be improved.
Constructive and meaningful feedback is an essential part of teaching and learning for students to get instrumental information. Thus, teachers and clinical instructors must receive adequate training on feedback. Familiarity with models and strategies of feedback can pave the way towards providing effective and constructive feedback.