Impact of Performance Feedback in Family-Centered and Culturally Responsive Interview Instruction

Conducting culturally responsive and family-centered diagnostic interviews is an important part of speech and language services. However, there is limited information on the effective ways to teach speech-language pathology graduate students to acquire these skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of performance feedback on graduate students' use of ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments in caregiver interviews.

A randomized controlled crossover design (n = 26) was used to examine the differential effects of students receiving performance feedback or general feedback on role-play interviews. Ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments were measured at 3 time points: after class instruction (Groups 1 and 2), after the first feedback type allocation (Group 1: performance feedback; Group 2: general feedback), and after the second feedback type allocation (Group 1: general feedback; Group 2: performance feedback).

Statistically significant increases, with large effect sizes, were found in students' use of ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments following the performance feedback conditions.

These findings suggest that performance feedback is an effective and efficient instructional procedure to increase culturally responsive and family-centered interview skills through an ethnographic interview approach in preservice speech-language pathology students.