Purpose
Journal club exercises offer learners opportunities to practice crafting and delivering effective audiovisual presentations. However, providing students with meaningful feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of their efforts can require significant faculty time and effort. This innovative journal club exercise leverages the possibility that peer feedback can be effective in improving students’ presentation skills

Methods
Second-year medical students (n=160) were assigned randomly into forty groups of four students. Each group was assigned to read and present one of three journal articles from the epidemiology literature. They had 4 days to prepare an audiovisual presentation of the article in which each group member presented at least one of five slides covering: Background, Methods, Results, Discussions/Limitations, and Summary. A Zoom recording (of 15 minutes or less) was made by each group and uploaded to the Learning Management System so that others could access the recordings for review. Having received 10 minutes in-person instruction on the principles of providing narrative feedback that was Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART), each group had 50 minutes in class to watch the recording produced by another group and provide narrative feedback to them on the quality of the presentation. Feedback was collected using a Qualtrics survey form and returned to the other group by email. To increase the likelihood that the feedback would be meaningful, all groups were assigned to review the presentation of another group that had read and presented the same journal article. 

Results
Several elements of this initiative were likely critical to its success. First, posting the recorded presentations to the course website uncoupled the timing of the feedback from the timing of the presentation, thereby eliminating any need to co-schedule presenters and reviewers in the same place and time. Second, providing students with a brief orientation to SMART feedback encouraged reviewers to provide feedback that recipients recognized as high-quality. Third assigning students to review a presentation of the same journal article enabled “spaced repetition” of the content of the article, and likely increased the specificity of the comments on the reviews. Fourth, scheduling in-class time for groups to collaboratively craft the SMART feedback made all group members accountable to each other for ensuring that feedback was high quality.

Conclusion
In summary, this journal club exercise successfully enabled a class with a low ratio of instructors/students to practice key analytical and communication skills because it was structured around collaboration, recordings of presentations, certainty that reviewers and presenters had read the same article, a brief orientation to the qualities of SMART feedback and accountability within groups for providing high quality feedback to peers.