How can we motivate students to read? Part 4

Goal Orientation Theory

Turning to goal orientation theories changes the discussion from the nature of goals to reasons and purposes for doing a task to attain a goal. The main question thus becomes why an individual engages with a goal. Three broad categories of goal orientations are well researched, viz, mastery goals, performance goals, and performance avoidance goals (Ames, 1992; Ames & Archer, 1987, 1988; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Nicholls, 1988; Elliot, 1997).

Mastery goals focus on learning and emphasize self-improvement, skill development, competence enhancement, seeking challenges, and gaining insights. On the contrary, performance goals focus on normative performance standards and emphasize demonstrating ability or competence. Performance avoidance goals are characterized by a fear of failure and looking incompetent. Motivation researchers promote mastery goals over performance goals as those are found to result in adaptive attributional patterns, positive attitudes toward learning, and use of deeper cognitive learning strategies, and have a stronger positive effect on motivation that may last longer.

In our reading intervention, we value the development of lifelong readers. We strive to promote mastery goals where students do not compete against each other but rather focus on becoming better readers in comparison to where they were. We like our students to see for themselves how they grew as readers over the period. Although we encourage setting a numerical goal for the reading task (number of pages), we are careful of not making it into a competition among students. In other words, we avoid performance goals and encourage students to work toward mastery goals by focusing on their progress and staying on the task. We explicitly promote the incremental approach to reading ability (i.e., reading ability is malleable) over the entity approach (i.e., reading ability is fixed) as suggested by Carol Dweck and colleagues (1983; 1988; 1999)

Next in the intervention, we introduced a role model named Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda is a popular historical Indian figure from the 19^th century who was known for his avid reading and erudite demeanor. We placed our intervention in the program calendar in such a way that the last day of the reading intervention matched with Vivekananda’s birth anniversary, celebrated across India as the National Youth Day. On this day, we paid our tribute to Vivekananda and everyone declared the completion/progress of their reading resolution to the class.

We saw that about 80% of students had completed the month-long task. We clicked a group picture to appreciate students’ efforts and no other incentives were involved. We repeated the intervention every subsequent year, and we love to see that the reading engagement and motivation has increased among our students. We are examining these changes more systematically using both quantitative measures and qualitative feedback from students and parents.

I hope to continue this discussion on motivation alive in the future on this blog. Till then, goodbye and stay well!