Academic Detailing From Medical Students: Part of a Plan to Emphasize Feedback in One Clerkship

Medical schools have an enduring need to provide ongoing faculty development and to foster educational alliances between teachers and learners, so that feedback provided to learners is both frequent and of high quality. We hypothesized that medical students trained as academic detailers with a mission to increase the emphasis on feedback could serve in this role during our clerkship, while still being evaluated as students in our clerkship rotation.

The family medicine clerkship at Mayo Clinic School of Medicine launched a revised curriculum in 2016 in which students were taught how they might build an educational alliance with preceptors, were taught characteristics of high-quality feedback, and practiced requesting more useful feedback when initial quality was poor. After utilizing a clerkship-specific curriculum with small group sessions on receiving feedback, and training students and preceptors on the SNAPPs model, students were then directed to request feedback from their preceptors and model successful feedback conversations for preceptors. The study evaluated the medical students' summative evaluations to compare the rate from the preintervention year (2015-2016) and the intervention year (2016-2017) at which preceptors added comments on students' use of feedback.

Preceptors' written comments about students seeking feedback increased at about a four-fold rate (74.4% vs 18.8%, P<.001) after implementing a suite of changes to our clerkship curriculum.

Using medical students to change preceptor behaviors was an important part of our suite of interventions. This intervention directed preceptor attention toward our instructional goal of increased medical student feedback.