Impact of Performance Feedback in Family-Centered and Culturally Responsive Interview Instruction

PURPOSE: Conducting culturally responsive and family-centered diagnostic interviews is an important part of speech and language services. However, there is limited information on the effective ways to teach speech-language pathology graduate students to acquire these skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of performance feedback on graduate students' use of ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments in caregiver interviews. METHOD: A randomized controlled crossover design (n = 26) was used to examine the differential effects of students receiving performance feedback or general feedback on role-play interviews. Ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments were measured at 3 time points: after class instruction (Groups 1 and 2), after the first feedback type allocation (Group 1: performance feedback; Group 2: general feedback), and after the second feedback type allocation (Group 1: general feedback; Group 2: performance feedback). RESULTS: Statistically significant increases, with large effect sizes, were found in students' use of ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments following the performance feedback conditions. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that performance feedback is an effective and efficient instructional procedure to increase culturally responsive and family-centered interview skills through an ethnographic interview approach in preservice speech-language pathology students.