Corrective feedback is a frequent practice in the field of learning and achievement. It typically involves a learner receiving either formal or informal feedback on their understanding or performance on various tasks by an agent such as teacher, employer or peer(s). To successfully deliver corrective feedback, it needs to be nonevaluative, supportive, timely, and specific.

Various types of corrective feedback exist, each with its own appropriate uses. Corrective feedback begins in early childhood with motherese, in which a parent or caregiver provides subtle corrections of a young child's spoken errors. Such feedback, known as a recast, often leads to the child repeating their utterance correctly (or with fewer errors) in imitation of the parent's model.

At the preschool or kindergarten level, corrective feedback is usually informal and verbal. Such feedback is common in the higher grades, as well, but, as students progress through the grades, it is conventional practice for their teachers to provide written corrections on their work samples or on separate feedback sheets. Written and oral feedback can be provided in the form of sentences (i.e., anecdotal feedback) describing the work's merits and weaknesses, in which case a typical practice involves the teacher pointing out three strengths and one "next step" for future improvement. Written feedback in particular can involve a certain amount of "markup" on the student's work, with errors underlined or circled and corrections inserted or noted in the margins.

Feedback can also be recorded as a score, such as a percentage, a letter grade, or an achievement level defined by a specific reference. Grades can be based on the teacher's overall impression of the work, but assessment based on explicit criteria is increasingly common. An example of such holistic assessment is a rubric. A typical rubric is a chart in the form of a grid that lists several criteria, performance indicators, and achievement levels. For example, a rubric for an essay-writing assignment may include "grammar" as one of its criteria; the performance indicator for an achievement level of "B" in grammar may be, "The essay contains several minor grammatical errors" while the performance indicator for an achievement level of "A" in grammar may be, "The essay contains no grammatical errors." Such rubrics enable students to see their strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis the various criteria.

Ways that would not be considered corrective feedback are just insults, telling someone that they are not good enough without telling why is not corrective feedback, it's just being rude and hurtful.

In the higher grades, corrections can become more numerous or more nuanced, although the frequency of corrections varies from teacher to teacher. Such corrections may be random in an effort to communicate to the student the range of errors made. Alternatively, corrections may be focused on a set of selected error types. For instance, teachers sometimes focus on correcting basic errors first in the hope of helping students overcome them promptly in order to address more complicated errors in subsequent assignments. Teachers may correct one, several, or even all instances of a particular error.

Some debate exists as to the number of total corrections that teachers should make on a given piece of work. Teachers who make voluminous corrections give a "true" sense of the extent to which students require remediation, but such feedback can be overwhelming. If students take such feedback to heart, they may see their performance as a failure, thus injuring their self-image and confidence. Students might then negate such feedback and dismiss it as overly critical, or they might fear that the teacher is biased against them personally. In contrast, teachers who make sparse corrections may better enable their students to focus on improving in one or a few key areas, but the omission of other helpful corrections may be detrimental to their students' progress in the long run. Specifically, students who make certain errors might be led to perceive that they are not making errors at all, or that those errors are not significant enough to warrant the effort required to re-learn the concepts involved and avoid similar errors in the future.

In the business world, feedback can be used as motivational tool as well as a coaching one. Best practice of feedback in the workplace consist of