Health Care Student Orientations to Giving and Using Feedback in Workplace Learning: The Dual-role Feedback Orientation Scale

Health professions education should prepare students to engage in feedback dialogues at the workplace. Studies often focus on students either giving or using feedback, and an instrument to address both dialogical roles is not yet available. Therefore, we adapted and extended the Feedback Orientation Scale into the Dual-role Feedback Orientation Scale (DrFOS). The DrFOS comprised 30 items, with separate User and Giver scales for Utility, Accountability, and Self-efficacy. The questionnaire was completed by 537 undergraduate 4-5th year medical and nursing students. Exploratory factor analyses showed that the User and Giver subscales could be meaningfully and reliably discerned. Students reported remarkably high User Utility scores, thus believe that feedback is indispensable to learn. Their Self-Efficacy as Givers was relatively low. Additional cluster analysis indicated that students had either high or low overall dual-role feedback orientations, or seemed to value using feedback but did not feel very accountable or competent either as giver or as user. The findings show that the DrFOS is worthwhile using in future research in health professions education. These studies could adopt longitudinal or intervention designs and explore the relations of Dual-role Feedback Orientation to other relevant outcome measures.