The authors’ objective was to study the role of error detection and retroactive self-regulation as determinants of performance in secondary education students. A total of 198 students participated in the quasiexperimental study, which involved a control group and two experimental groups. This enabled the authors to analyze the effects of both error detection and the subsequent self-regulation by means of several analyses of variance. In addition, the authors analyzed the effect of an assessment script on student's self-assessment. Nevertheless, the divergence in both their self-assessment and error detection was most pronounced when not using the assessment instrument. Furthermore, the correlation analysis revealed that error detection was significantly and positively correlated with students’ performance. Students who conducted error detection and subsequently formulated and completed self-regulation activities achieved better performance. The study results suggest that the use of error detection as a tool has considerable potential in the teaching and learning process.