The effect of feedback on students’ abilities to write daily progress notes

Previous research has shown that the majority of medical schools do not formally teach medical writing, including writing of progress notes. The purpose of this research was to determine the impact consistently provided objective feedback has on enhancing the quality of student notes. A static group‐comparison design was used to determine the quality of progress notes written by students who received structured written feedback versus those given traditional feedback. Twenty patient names were selected from students’ logbooks from both groups, totaling 40 patient charts. Progress notes were blindly reviewed by 1 faculty member, using a checklist instrument, which was studied for evidence of reliability and validity. Results showed a statistically significant (p = .05) difference between the groups’ abilities to write assessment and plan portions of a progress note, but no differences were noted on student abilities to document subjective data. Findings suggest some students often have an inability to inte...