4.E.1
Behaviorally anchored feedback on strengths and growth
ASPPB's competency statement 4.E.1: Regularly provide behaviorally anchored feedback about supervisee strengths and areas that need further development
Feedback helps a supervisee improve when it describes specific, observed behavior and its effect, links to agreed goals or benchmarks, comes regularly and soon after the work, and covers strengths as well as areas to develop. Vague praise or criticism about the person gives nothing to act on. Because self-assessment is often inaccurate, a supervisor's observed feedback is essential, delivered within a two-way conversation.
Key ideas
- Behavioral anchoring
- Name what the supervisee did, when, and what followed, as observed on a recording, in a report or live. Ende stressed focusing on observable behavior rather than on the trainee as a person.
- Feedback and evaluation
- Feedback is ongoing information meant to guide future performance; evaluation is a summary judgment. Ende distinguished the two, and regular feedback means a final evaluation brings no surprises.
- Specific and goal-linked
- Archer's review concluded that feedback should focus on the task rather than the individual, be specific and be linked to personal goals, with competency benchmarks giving a shared standard.
- Strengths and growth areas
- Naming what works, with the same specificity as what needs to change, tells the supervisee what to keep doing and makes the corrective feedback more credible.
- External information
- Self-assessment correlates poorly with observed performance, often worst among the least skilled, so supervisees need external feedback to calibrate their own view, ideally starting from what they noticed themselves.
Worked example
A supervisor reviewing a practicum student's first psychological assessment report is tempted to write: "Good effort, but the report is disorganized and hard to follow."
- Find the specific features behind the impression: the results section lists scores without saying what they mean for the referral question, and the summary raises a diagnosis not discussed earlier.
- Find a strength with equal specificity: the description of the client's behavior during testing is precise and clearly relevant to the interpretation.
- Link both to the program's benchmark for written assessment reports, so the student sees the standard behind the comments.
- Ask the student first how they saw the report, then agree on one or two revisions to try and review in the next draft.
Replace general judgments with observed behaviors, tied to a standard, that the supervisee can repeat or change.
Check yourself
After each recorded session, a supervisor gives an intern specific comments on what worked and what to try next; at the end of the rotation the supervisor completes a final rating. In Ende's terms, the comments after each session are:
Sources
- Ende (1983), Feedback in clinical medical education, JAMA, 250(6), 777-781 (PMID 6876333), Abstract: the distinction between feedback and evaluation; focus on observable behaviors rather than the trainee
- Archer (2010), State of the science in health professional education: Effective feedback, Medical Education, 44(1), 101-108 (PMID 20078761), Abstract: feedback focused on the task, specific and linked to personal goals; self-assessment has no theoretical basis as a guide to learning needs
- Davis, Mazmanian, Fordis, Van Harrison, Thorpe and Perrier (2006), Accuracy of physician self-assessment compared with observed measures of competence: A systematic review, JAMA, 296(9), 1094-1102 (PMID 16954489), Abstract: limited accuracy of self-assessment, worst among the least skilled and most confident
- APA (2002, with the 2010 and 2016 amendments), Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, Standard 7.06(a) and (b), Assessing Student and Supervisee Performance
- American Psychological Association (2015), Guidelines for clinical supervision in health service psychology, American Psychologist, 70(1), 33-46 (PMID 25581007), revised in 2025 into six domains, Assessment, evaluation and feedback, a domain of the 2015 version
- Grus, Falender, Goodyear, Tao and Jordan (2026), The revised American Psychological Association guidelines for clinical supervision: Rationale, revisions, and implications for practice and scholarship, Psychotherapy, advance online publication (PMID 42821409), Abstract: 2025 Domain D, Teaching and Learning Strategies (the 2025 domains do not list assessment and feedback separately)