Why students ignore our comments

As teachers, it makes us feel better — like we’re doing our jobs — when we give lots of pointed feedback. But how much does it help kids when we overwhelm them and they can’t actually use any of it? - Matt Miller

For many of us, the problem with feedback we give to students is that they just don't seem to want it that badly.  

One of the realities for our students is that our feedback is only one part their very long days. Depending on what that student has going on that day, the analysis of Hamlet we assigned might not be very high on the priority list.  They twelve comments we make on that analysis just might be an awful lot of commentary on a piece that has several problems:

1.  It's over.
2. The student won't be writing another one.
3.  The student might not have cared about it that much anyway.

In a recent blog post, however, Matt Miller cites another, more subtle problem:

There’s this thing called cognitive load. It’s the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. I figured that if I gave students more than one or two suggestions during their writing, it would be more like cognitive OVERload. So I chose my feedback wisely.

It’s like coaching little kids to hit a baseball. They have a LOT to learn. If you tell them seven different things to remember when they go to bat, they won’t remember any of them.

One way for us to provide feedback to students that they will actually use is to make wise choices about when and how much feedback we give.  Miller's answer is to provide it immediately (by walking around the room) and to give the most pointed, specific feedback possible.

It's a nice discussion of feedback in the first half of the post.