Dental schools struggle to teach students critical thinking through peer feedback
A study of nearly 4,000 peer comments in dental education reveals that while students can give specific, actionable feedback, they often default to passive praise rather than critical analysis. The finding suggests that professional training programs may need to overhaul how they teach evaluation skills—a gap with implications for quality control in healthcare and other fields relying on peer assessment.
Originaltitel: Exploring feedback and feedforward in dental education using a followership model
Objectives The study aimed to explore the feedback and feedforward quality in the clinical setting and the usability of a followership model as a framework to analyze and map students' peer feedback. Method Feedback and feedforward from 59 fourth-year dental students' clinical portfolios were collected and analyzed using a combination of deductive coding and interpretative content analysis. The analysis was first organized into predefined code categories (specific and actionable, non-specific, confirmatory, description of what was done, and other comments). The comments provided to peers were clustered and analyzed in relation to Kelley's theoretical followership framework. Results A total of 3,877 free-text comments were included in the analysis. Regardless of role, most comments were coded as specific and actionable ( n = 3,012). Confirmatory comments were frequently directed at peers. Comments that were only confirmatory were defined as reflecting dependent, uncritical thinking and passive behavior; this was the most frequent category among peer comments ( n = 656). Non-specific comments were defined as reflecting dependent, uncritical thinking and active behavior, and this category was rare ( n = 79). Comments that were confirmatory, specific, and actionable were defined as expressions of independent, critical thinking and active behavior ( n = 442). Conclusion The analysis of feedback and feedforward in relation to followership seems to be a valid conceptual model. We found that peer feedback was often confirmatory and could be improved by incorporating specific and actionable feedforward. The followership model was shown to be a useful tool for structuring and analyzing peer feedback and feedforward, and it will be used as a tool for learning and quality assessment in future longitudinal studies.