I'm looking for research (for instance from psychology) showing that detailed feedback and criticism improves performance greatly and would be very grateful if I could get any tips in this regard. (I think I've heard that this is the case but can't find any papers on this.) I'm especially interested in how criticisms of texts can improve authors' writings but am also interested in examples from other fields.

I'm thinking that such feedback could improve performance via (at least) two mechanisms:

a) It teaches you exactly what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong; i.e. gives you knowledge b) It may incentivize you to do things rightly, if you want to get praise and avoid criticism. The strength of this incentive obviously depends on the context; for instance, public feedback should generally provide you with stronger incentives than private feedback.

This seems intuitively clear, but still it would be nice to have some research saying that the effect of feedback is very strong (if it is, as I suspect). Any help is greatly appreciated.