What Happens When Error Correction is Delivered with Fidelity

What Happens When Error Correction is Delivered with Fidelity

Correcting all errors, or providing corrective feedback, is a powerful effective teaching technique and an important part of teaching to mastery. 

Using the technique with fidelity ensures that students are learning the content correctly and are mastering tasks from the lesson before moving on to subsequent lessons. Every student must reach mastery on every lesson. Giving corrective feedback is an important opportunity to support and teach students.

In effective teaching, corrections are immediate specific and informative. The teacher notices every error, identifies the type of error made, gives the appropriate correction and provides more practice to firm the response. Errors requiring correction may be specific errors such as misidentifying sounds or words or giving the wrong answer; or general errors such as signal response errors and droning. 

Corrective feedback that gives the student the correct answer and contains information that has the potential to change future answers allows students to build their self-confidence in learning. By following the full correction procedure, the teacher can ensure that students do not practise skills incorrectly.