Workshop Improves Clinical Teachers’ Self-Efficacy but Feedback Links Differ Across Dimensions

Clinical educators participating in an Instructional Skills Workshop programme demonstrated substantial gains in their teaching self-efficacy across two independent cohorts, yet the degree to which these improvements related to feedback experiences diverged markedly depending on the teaching domain. While participants reported large, statistically significant increases in their confidence regarding instructional strategies, student engagement, and classroom management, the source data indicate that feedback was not uniformly linked to every dimension of growth. Specifically, self-efficacy improvements in classroom management showed no measurable association with feedback experience in either training group, challenging the conventional presumption that feedback serves as a single, universal mechanism propelling all teacher development outcomes.

The investigated training intervention relies on the Instructional Skills Workshop model, an established framework designed to cultivate teaching competence among clinical instructors. This educational model operates through structured, repeated cycles that integrate microteaching sessions, direct feedback from both peers and facilitators, and subsequent re-practice opportunities. As noted by the researchers, the prevailing literature on instructional workshops typically evaluates training outcomes as an aggregated global metric.

The initial cohort, conducted in 2022, comprised thirty-seven educators, while the subsequent 2024 cohort included thirty-nine clinical instructors, functioning as an intentional temporal replication to evaluate the consistency of the findings. By repeating the protocol across two distinct participant groups over time, the research framework sought to establish whether observed self-efficacy trajectories and feedback dynamics represented stable patterns rather than isolated cohort-specific anomalies.

The investigative team assessed teaching self-efficacy before and after the programme using a twelve-item questionnaire adapted from the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale, commonly known as the TSES. This instrument captured three core pedagogical domains: student engagement, instructional strategies, and classroom management. To evaluate participants’ perceptions of feedback during the workshops, the investigators administered a thirty-item questionnaire adapted from the Assessment Experience Questionnaire, or AEQ, which evaluated five distinct dimensions of feedback experience, including what learners actively do with the feedback they receive.

Statistical evaluations relied on paired t-tests alongside Cohen’s dz calculations to quantify the magnitude of pre-to-post workshop changes, while Pearson correlation coefficients assessed associations between feedback experience dimensions and self-efficacy gain scores, denoted as delta. The analytical plan applied no corrections for multiple comparisons, deliberately relying on cross-cohort replication as the primary standard for evidential credibility. In both cohorts, clinical teachers achieved statistically significant gains across all three measured self-efficacy dimensions, with each comparison yielding a p-value below point zero zero one. The standardized effect sizes were consistently large across the board, with Cohen’s dz values ranging from 1.20 to 1.75 in the 2022 cohort and from 1.42 to 1.54 in the 2024 cohort, although the relative magnitude of improvement among the three dimensions varied between groups.

Despite uniform self-efficacy growth across all domains, correlation analyses revealed a replicated divergence in how these gains related to feedback experiences. In both cohorts, improvements in instructional strategies correlated significantly with what learners reported doing with feedback. In stark contrast, self-efficacy gains in classroom management exhibited no statistically significant correlation with any of the five feedback dimensions in either the 2022 or 2024 cohort, with the highest observed Pearson correlation coefficients reaching only point two seven and point one eight, respectively. The investigators explicitly emphasized that given the relatively small cohort samples and limited statistical power, this lack of correlation must be interpreted as a failure to detect an association rather than definitive evidence that no underlying relationship exists.

The authors concluded that while the Instructional Skills Workshop programme robustly enhanced clinical teachers’ self-efficacy across student engagement, instructional strategies, and classroom management, feedback experience cannot be assumed to be the sole unifying driver behind every pedagogical gain. Consequently, the study highlights that instructional feedback should not be presumed to operate as an all-encompassing mechanism driving development across all teaching competencies, presenting an empirical hypothesis that warrants further systematic investigation in medical education.

Subject of Research: Clinical teachers' teaching self-efficacy and feedback experience after instructional skills workshops

Article Title: Clinical teachers’ teaching self-efficacy after instructional skills workshops: only some improvements are associated with feedback experience — a two-cohort study

Article References: Xiang, L., Mao, H., & Shu, J. (2026). Clinical teachers’ teaching self-efficacy after instructional skills workshops: only some improvements are associated with feedback experience — a two-cohort study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10571-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10571-6

Keywords: instructional skills workshop, clinical teachers, teaching self-efficacy, feedback experience, microteaching, instructional strategies, classroom management, student engagement, two-cohort study, temporal replication, TSES questionnaire, AEQ questionnaire, pre-post design, Cohen's dz, paired t-tests, Pearson correlations, medical education