How do we motivate students to read? Part 1

Reading is arguably the most researched domain in educational research. Reading has two aspects: cognitive and motivational. For a long time, reading researchers have focused more on the cognitive aspect than the motivational aspect (Wigfield, 1997). Because reading holds a fundamental place in academic and non-academic endeavors, it becomes important for educators to find answers to the question – “How can we motivate students to read?” In a series of blog posts, I will write about the answer to this question. Let’s ride on this journey of reading motivation!

In an outside-of-school talent development program that my colleagues and I run in India, we administered a basic reading speed and reading comprehension test in October 2017. We gave about 80 middle-school students short prose to read (approximately 800 words) and timed their reading. Later, we gave them ten comprehension-based questions on the prose they read earlier.

The results of the test were pretty disappointing, and we found out the students’ reading speed and reading comprehension scores (calculated in terms of words read per minute) were much lower than we expected for children with high cognitive abilities. The reading tests were conducted in both English and Marathi languages. Marathi was the Native language of 94% of students, and English was the medium of language at school for 94% of students.

In response to this disappointment, we designed and implemented a month-long, reading-based intervention to improve students’ reading abilities, skills, and motivation. We repeated the experiment in 2018 and 2019-2020. It was only in the 2019-2020 experiment that we introduced standardized instruments to assess students’ reading motivation and breadth of reading.

Reading involves several motivational constructs in several theoretical approaches. These include students’ ability beliefs (i.e., am I capable of reading well?), expectancies for success (i.e., can I succeed in reading tasks?), self-efficacy beliefs (i.e., am I good enough for reading tasks?), subjective task values (i.e., do I value reading?), intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (i.e., do I love reading because it is joyful or do I read because it will bring me external rewards?), and achievement goals (i.e., do I read to become a better reader that earlier self or do I read to become a better reader than others?).

This list is only illustrative and not exhaustive. In this blog series, I will discuss various motivational constructs mentioned above and implications of various theories of motivation as they relate to reading. I will use my colleagues’ and my work on the reading intervention we developed together as a central case study for this blog series.

The Reading Intervention

After my colleagues and I conducted the pre-assessment of students’ reading performance as mentioned earlier, we assessed the results and realized that we needed to work with students on two different fronts (a) develop better reading skills and appropriate reading habits, and (b) enhance reading motivation. The former goal focuses on the cognitive aspect of reading, and therefore, I have excluded it from this blog series. On the latter front, we decided to encourage students to willingly take up a month-long resolution to read ten pages per day (300 pages in total over a month).

We started with a pre-assessment of reading ability (reading speed and comprehension) and reading habits. We then introduced the month-long reading resolution. During this time, we met with students once a week for three hours. After a gap of a few months, we conducted the post-assessment of reading performance. Empirically, we found out a statistically significant growth in students’ reading ability with large effect sizes for both languages.

However, we did not find any improvement in their reading habits (most probably because their pre-assessment scores on the reading habit questionnaire were overestimated). Anecdotally, we did see a strong rise in students’ motivation for reading, especially among students who read less frequently. These anecdotes include parents’ and teachers’ anecdotal records. What led to these positive results from the resolution-based reading intervention?

In the upcoming blog posts, I will explain how we used several motivational theories/constructs and their implications to develop our reading intervention. Hope you enjoy our journey!