Assessment of The Status of Perceived Feedback Provision in Clinical Education of Undergraduate Midwifery Students at Ahvaz University of Medical Sciences, Iran

Abstract

Background: Developing and building clinical competencies in health science students is the fundamental goal of education, and meaningful and principled feedback is essential for learners to access constructive and useful information. Objectives: The main aim of this study is to investigate the status of perceived feedback in clinical education (PFCE) provision among undergraduate midwifery students at Ahvaz University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Methods: In this study, 74 undergraduate midwifery students in the fourth, sixth, and eighth semesters of Ahvaz University of Medical Sciences were selected by simple random sampling method and were engaged in clinical learning in three educational departments including maternity, health, and women. All students completed a demographic characteristics questionnaire once and completed the PFCE questionnaire for each of the clinical education departments. Finally, the findings were analyzed using SPSS-Ver.26 software. Results: The findings showed that the factor "students' academic semester" is an influential factor in students' PFCE scores (P < 0.05), while the factor "educational departments" does not have a significant effect on students' PFCE scores (P > 0.05). In addition, in evaluating the simultaneous effect of academic semester and educational department, only the average PFCE score of fourth-semester students had a significant difference between the two educational departments of women and health (P < 0.05), and no significant difference was observed between other educational departments (P > 0.05). Also, the average PFCE scores of sixth- and eighth-semester students showed that there was no significant difference between any of the educational departments (P > 0.05). Conclusions: Based on the findings, it can be said that in order to receive a better and more effective PFCE, it is necessary to consider factors related to learners, the most important of which include learners' interest, their academic level and skills, learners' gender, learners' perception of themselves and the teacher, and learners' perception of the feedback content. Among the different educational sectors, the health sector, especially for lower semester students (fourth and sixth), had a lower PFCE score than other educational sectors, while the highest PFCE score was obtained for the maternity sector. Encouraging teachers to increase learners' awareness of the high importance of all educational fields can improve students' PFCE levels for educational fields that are less important to them.