Feedback and the educational alliance: examining credibility judgements and their consequences.

Context: Several recent studies have documented the fact that, in considering feedback, learners are actively making credibility judgements about the feedback and its source. Yet few have intentionally explored such judgements to gain a deeper understanding of how the process works or how these judgements might interact to influence engagement with and interpretation of feedback. Using the educational alliance framework, we sought to elaborate an understanding of learners' credibility judgements and their consequences.

The "educational alliance" as a framework for reconceptualizing feedback in medical education.

Feedback has long been considered a vital component of training in the health professions. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to enact the feedback process effectively. In part, this may be because, historically, feedback has been framed in the medical education literature as a unidirectional content-delivery process with a focus on ensuring the learner's acceptance of the content.