Student Perceptions of Narrative Feedback in Entrustable Professional Activities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Entrustable professional activity (EPA) observations can be used to develop a holistic picture of trainee competency in professional tasks. Narrative feedback is an essential component of EPAs, but there is a lack of published literature capturing undergraduate student perceptions. METHODS: Students who completed Year 3 of the MD programme in 2022-2023 at one institution in Canada were invited to participate in a survey designed to elicit their perceptions of narrative feedback in EPAs. Survey methods included closed-ended questions (analysed descriptively) and open-ended questions (analysed through thematic analysis). RESULTS: The response rate to the survey was 23%. Over 60% of students reported that narrative comments in EPAs were specific and aligned with EPA scores, and 86% reported that the narrative feedback was individualised at least some of the time. However, 57% reported that they never or rarely received actionable feedback for growth. Students demonstrated mixed feelings as to whether EPAs help support their clinical development. Some noted that they can help students identify gaps and reinforce positives. Others reported preferring verbal feedback to written feedback and that EPAs resulted in an administrative burden. Over 90% of students reported barriers to obtaining EPAs, and almost 90% expressed the need for changes to EPAs. A predominant theme from students was the desire for a reduction in EPA requirements. CONCLUSIONS: Students perceived the narrative feedback to be individualized and specific but reported that the feedback rarely contained feedback for growth. Students identified several barriers to EPA completion and provided recommended changes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".