The Practitioner Le praticien The occasional teacher. Part 4: feedback and evaluation

Feedback and evaluation are separate entities. Feedback is informal, nonjudgmental and brief, and hopefully provides informa tion about recent performance to pro mote positive change. 1 Evaluation is, by its nature, judgmental. It measures learners against their peers, occurs at specific times (e.g., at the rotation’s end) and will determine whether learn ers pass or fail a rotation. As a rural preceptor, you may be the only instructor who sees a learner per form in multiple settings as he or she encounters multiple undifferentiated patient presentations and works with many health care professionals. As such, your feedback and evaluation will provide an important, holistic view of the learner, and you will be able to more accurately judge the student’s strengths and weaknesses. For feedback to be fair and effec tive, the preceptor should know what expectations are appropriate for the learner’s level of training. For the occa sional teacher, this may be difficult. To become familiar with the school’s ex pectations of the rotation, it can be helpful to review the objectives for the