Evaluation and Feedback

Abstract

The provision of timely, specific, and behaviorally based feedback is one of the most effective tools at the disposal of medical educators to help trainees guide their learning and improve their performance. In the absence of such feedback, trainees tend to determine for themselves the quality of their work, often inaccurately. Engaging in feedback can be highly anxiety provoking for international medical graduate (IMG) resident physicians. The literature on IMG physicians reviewed for this chapter does not, for the most part, specify country of origin. We have limited this chapter to information that represents commonalities of IMG physicians' experiences, while it is important to keep in mind the heterogeneities of this subset of medical graduates. Without an understanding of the cultural, linguistic, educational, and social factors that shape the IMG physician experience, faculty are likely to misinterpret IMG physician responses to educational endeavors in residency as indifference or resistance, or attribute identified performance deficits to problems of knowledge or skill when they are more accurately related to levels of cultural or language competence. In this chapter, we will discuss some of the ways that these cultural and linguistic factors can impact IMG physicians' experiences with feedback, supervision, and formal assessment in residency education, and we will provide guidelines for how to help IMG physicians engage most effectively in feedback. We will also offer some suggestions for the organization of Clinical Skills Verification examinations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)