Including Entrustment Language in an Assessment Form May Improve Constructive Feedback for Student Clinical Skills

Workplace-based assessments provide valuable data for educators who make summative judgments regarding students’ clinical skills, but may be limited by a lack of constructive feedback. Including an explicit rating of learner “entrustment” may prompt faculty to provide better feedback. To assess this hypothesis, we added a single-item entrustment rating to forms faculty use to assess students’ clinical skills. Faculty provided more written feedback to students and were willing to use lower ratings when using forms with entrustment language. Entrustment ratings may serve to enhance faculty’s feedback and rating of students in clinical performance.