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Child Dev Perspect. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 September 07. Published in final edited form as: Child Dev Perspect. 2016 September ; 10(3): 190–195. doi:10.1111/cdep.12184.
Beyond Cognition: Reading Motivation and Reading Comprehension Allan Wigfield, Jessica Gladstone, and Lara Turci Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland
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The authors review research on children’s reading motivation and its relation to their reading comprehension. They begin by discussing work on the development of school motivation in general and reading motivation in particular, reviewing work showing that many children’s reading motivation declines over the school years. Girls tend to have more positive motivation for reading than do boys, and there are ethnic differences in children’s reading motivation. Over the last 15 years researchers have identified in both laboratory and classroom-based research instructional practices that positively impact students’ reading motivation and ultimately their reading comprehension. There is a strong need for researchers to build on this work and develop and study in different age groups of children effective classroom-based reading motivation instructional programs for a variety of narrative and informational materials.
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In their Child Development Perspectives article on learning to read, Hulme and Snowling (1) stated"learning to read is a key objective of early education and difficulties in learning to read can have serious adverse consequences” (p. 1). They focused on cognitive explanations for early reading development. Here we build on their insightful paper by discussing reading motivation and its relation to children’s reading comprehension skills across the school years. Proficient reading comprehension is crucial for success in every academic domain, and particularly in courses focused on reading and literature (2). As students advance in their education, they are expected to read and write across a wide variety of disciplines with increasing skill, flexibility, and insight (3). Because reading materials become increasingly demanding in later childhood and adolescence, readers must be fluent in the processes of word decoding and recognition, continually expand their vocabularies and knowledge base, and learn to use elaborate cognitive strategies to make inferences and critically analyze text (4). Hulme and Snowling (1) discuss that the fluency of these skills is dependent upon development of earlier foundational reading abilities such as phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in early childhood, two essential components of reading words and sentences. Because of the hierarchical nature of reading skill development, slow growth along any of these dimensions can result in significant difficulty and negative consequences for students’ reading comprehension and achievement more generally as they progress through school (1). To master the skills and strategies just described children must commit time and effort to learn them; thus students must be motivated to learn and then utilize them fully.
Author contact information: Allan Wigfield, Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742. Address correspondence to: [email protected].
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Unfortunately, national statistics demonstrate that many children struggle with reading early in their education and continue to struggle throughout their school years. In 2015, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) found that 64% of fourth-grade, and 66% of eighth-grade, students were at or below proficiency (defined by NAEP as “solid academic performance”) for reading performance (5). Further, 31% of fourth-grade, and 24% of eighth-grade, students were at or below basic level, which means that they have only partially mastered the prerequisite knowledge and skills needed for successful academic performance. These statistics are very troubling, particularly because reading below grade level in third grade is among the strongest predictors of later school drop out (6).
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Reading performance and other achievement outcomes are even bleaker for students of color; the achievement gap between European American and African American students has only slightly narrowed since the inception of NAEP in 1992 (5). Students of color who have fallen behind grade level reading comprehension are especially susceptible to drop out of school (7). Paired with findings indicating that students of color are disproportionately affected by poverty, unemployment, and inadequate educational opportunities (8), the vulnerability of students of color for low reading comprehension and its negative outcomes is particularly troubling. Poor reading comprehension is thus an integrated component of the structural inequalities that serve as barriers to fruitful careers and higher education.
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As efforts focused primarily on skill building and strategy instruction have continually failed to improve national student performance and narrow academic achievement gaps, some researchers have begun to focus on how children’s motivation to read relates to reading comprehension. We discuss this work in this article, beginning with how we and others define reading motivation. We then discuss how reading motivation develops, and relates to different achievement outcomes. We focus next on gender and ethnic differences in reading motivation and comprehension, followed by discussion of instructional programs designed to enhance children’s reading motivation and comprehension. We close with suggestions for future research.
Defining Reading Motivation
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Prominent theoretical models of achievement motivation focus on children’s beliefs, values, and goals as the primary “drivers” of their motivation (see 9, 10). Central motivational beliefs include competence-related beliefs such as self-efficacy, or one’s confidence in one’s ability to accomplish different tasks (11), and the sense of control and autonomy individuals have over their learning (12). When students believe they are efficacious at a given activity such as reading they do better, even when controlling for previous performance (11). Researchers also have discussed different ways in which individuals value activities, including how important they are to the individual, how useful they might be, and whether or not they are interested in the activity (13). Students’ valuing of activities such as reading are particularly important influences on their choice to do them. Researchers distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for different activities, with intrinsic motivation arising from the individual’s own self-expressed interests and extrinsic motivation based on outside influences such as rewards and grades. Ryan and Deci (12) reviewed much work showing that intrinsic motivation relates to longer-term engagement in achievement
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activities. Individuals have different kinds of goals and goal orientations for the achievement activities in which they engage, such as the goal of increasing one’s knowledge (mastery goal orientation), or the goal of outperforming others (performance goal orientation) (14). These goal orientations relate in systematic ways to different achievement outcomes (15) and it is important to note that many students hold both of them. Finally, although motivation often is considered an individual variable or characteristic, social context and social relations impact students’ motivation as well, particularly during the early adolescent years (2).
Development of Reading Motivation
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Wigfield et al. (10) review extant work on the development of children’s achievement motivation. In brief, many young children tend to have a strong sense of their competence for the different activities they do in school. Children also initially find most school activities to be interesting and exciting, resulting in enthusiasm and valuing of academic activities. Unfortunately, for many children this optimistic beginning does not last. Researchers have found children’s competence beliefs, intrinsic motivation, and valuing of academic subjects decrease across the school years (16). Researchers focusing on the development of reading motivation in particular generally have found decreases over age in reading attitudes and motivation (see 17, for review). For instance, McKenna, Kear, and Ellsworth’s (18) work on children’s attitudes toward reading shows that across the elementary school years, children report liking reading less each year. The 2015 NAEP report supports these findings and indicates that many children in middle school become actively resistant to engaging in reading (5). Guthrie, Klauda, and Morrison (8) found that middle school students overwhelmingly describe the information texts they read in science classes as boring, irrelevant, and difficult to understand—hardly a recipe for positive motivation to read this material. These changes in students’ competence beliefs, values, and intrinsic motivation have been explained in two main ways: Intrapersonal change and environmental change. Through the school years, children’s capacity to understand their own performance increases (see 10). They receive more and more feedback about their performance in school, and become more sophisticated at understanding its meaning. Evaluative information such as report cards and feedback about performance on academic projects and tests can lead some children to realize that they are not as capable as their peers; also potentially resulting in a decrease in intrinsic motivation to learn.
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A second (and related) explanation focuses on how certain evaluation practices contribute to the decline in some children’s motivation. Researchers and policy makers have discussed a variety of such practices (see 19 for detailed review). These practices include the following. Due to an increase in educational accountability at different levels, school administrators require teachers to implement more formal and frequent evaluations of their students. Practices that emphasize social comparison and encourage excessive competition among children (e.g., class ranking, spelling bees) may lead them to focus on how their skills compare to others. Such practices can deflate children’s competence beliefs, particularly those of children doing less well (see 20).
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Certain instructional practices can undermine children’s intrinsic motivation for learning as well. Instruction that makes few attempts to spark children’s interest and, as mentioned earlier, utilizes unappealing texts can decrease intrinsic motivation. If teachers overly restrict student choice of reading topics or materials, they risk stifling intrinsic motivation and autonomy (12). Finally, Assor, Kaplan, and Roth (21) found that when students do not see the relevance of what they are learning to their own values and goals, they are less engaged in learning.
Relations of Reading Motivation to Different Reading Outcomes
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But why should we be concerned about these declines? One major reason is that reading motivation is strongly associated with reading outcomes, such as students’ reading comprehension, use of effective strategies, and course grades (22). In this section we discuss how the motivational belief, value, and goal variables defined above relate to children’s reading outcomes. Students’ competence beliefs and self-efficacy Research has revealed that students reporting higher levels of self-efficacy and perceived competence obtained higher reading comprehension scores than students reporting lower levels of perceived competence, even when previous performance is controlled (11). Furthermore, students with high self-efficacy see difficult reading tasks as challenging and work towards mastering them, utilizing cognitive strategies productively in the process (11). High self-efficacy has also been found to improve performance on standardized reading tests in middle school students (23).
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Perceived autonomy The relationship between perceived autonomy and reading achievement has been well documented, particularly in elementary school students (24). Elementary school students’ perceived autonomy in the form of being allowed to select books to read and valuing book selection predicted their growth in reading comprehension across four months (24). Children who valued choosing their own books subsequently developed elaborate strategies for selecting books and reported being more intrinsically motivated readers. Students’ valuing of reading
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As noted earlier students’ valuing of reading and other subjects predict their choice of activities (13). Durik, Vida, and Eccles (25) found that children’s valuing of reading in fourth grade predicted their leisure time reading activities in 10th grade, and 10th grade students who valued reading read for career aspirations. Children’s valuing of reading also correlates with their reading achievement and engagement in school reading tasks at the primary and secondary school levels (26). Students’ intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation Student’s intrinsic motivation correlates positively with their reading achievement and predicts their reading achievement over time (27, 28). By contrast, Meece and Miller (29) found that students’ extrinsic motivation related to the use of surface strategies for reading
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and the desire to complete a task for a grade rather than to understand the task. These findings suggest that although extrinsic motivation is positively associated with reading grades it is less likely to positively influence reading comprehension (28). Students’ goal orientations Students with mastery goals make more metacognitive comments, paraphrase text more often, and make more connecting inferences than students who have a performance goal orientation (28); however, mastery goals often do not relate to indicators of performance like grades. By contrast, students’ performance goals do relate to their reading grades (28). Social motivation
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Children who like to participate in a group of learners by completing needed tasks are likely intrinsically motivated readers and subsequently have more positive reading outcomes (30). Social motivation also leads to increased amounts of reading, more effort, and higher levels of achievement in reading (31). In summary, students’ reading motivation correlates with their reading comprehension in important ways. Do these results apply to different kinds of students? We turn to that topic next.
Gender and Ethnic Differences in Reading Motivation and Comprehension There are important group-level differences in the patterns just discussed; we focus on gender and ethnic differences in children’s reading motivation and comprehension because they have been researched the most to date.
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Gender differences Researchers have found that throughout elementary and secondary school, females outperform males on various measures of reading achievement both in the U. S. (32) and in the PISA international comparison studies (33). Girls also report higher reading motivation than do boys (27, 34). Interestingly, Jacobs et al. (16) found that male and female students had similar competence beliefs in reading in the first two years of elementary school but both the male students’ competence beliefs and value of reading subsequently declined more rapidly than did females. These findings may reflect cultural expectations that females will be more positive about reading than males (35), and suggest that research needs to focus on improving male students’ competence beliefs and value of reading alongside current efforts to foster female students’ involvement in the sciences.
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Ethnic differences Although the research on this issue is more limited than that on gender differences, researchers have found that African American students report higher self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and valuing of reading than do their European American peers (27, 36), despite often performing more poorly on the reading outcomes measures.. In addition, the relation of children’s reading motivation to their performance varies across ethnic groups (27, 28, 37). Unrau and Schlackman (37) found that intrinsic motivation related more positively to
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reading achievement for Asian American students than for Latino students. Baker and Wigfield (27) found that European American students’ reading motivation related more strongly to their reading achievement than that of African American students, and Wang and Guthrie (28) found intrinsic motivation to relate positively, and extrinsic motivation to relate negatively, to text comprehension at similar levels for both American and Chinese students. These variations suggest the significance of ethnicity in shaping students’ reading motivation and the extent to which it affects academic performance, and thus should be explored further.
Instructional Programs to Enhance Reading Comprehension
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Given that many students’ reading motivation declines and their reading motivation relates to their comprehension, it is crucial to work with teachers and other educators to enhance students’ reading motivation. Researchers now have identified a set of instructional practices that can foster students’ reading motivation and engagement, focusing on the motivation constructs discussed earlier in this article (see 38 for review). These practices include facilitating students’ success to build their self-efficacy, helping them to see the importance and relevance of what they are learning, giving them some autonomy over their learning, and allowing many social interactions around reading.
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Researchers examining the effectiveness of these practices in laboratory studies that have focused on one of these practices have shown that they impact positively students’ reading motivation and comprehension (22, 38). We know of only one large scale classroom-based instruction program that has examined how a focus on reading motivation in classroom instructional practices impacts students’ reading motivation and comprehension: Concept Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). CORI was developed by Guthrie, Wigfield, and their colleagues (39, 40), and the instructional practices in CORI focus on enhancing children’s reading motivation and comprehension within a content domain—usually science or social studies. In CORI teachers provide reading strategy instruction and also implement teaching practices that focus on enhancing the motivation variables just described: Students’ selfefficacy, autonomy, value of reading, intrinsic motivation, and collaboration in reading. For instance, to enhance students’ perceived autonomy in reading students are given many choices regarding what they read. To enhance their self-efficacy teachers ensure students at all reading levels experience success with the materials they are reading.
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At both the elementary and middle school levels, students who experienced CORI had higher reading motivation, greater engagement in reading, and higher reading comprehension for different reading activities than did students in strategy-instruction only conditions (in which they were taught a variety of successful reading strategies as documented in the National Reading Panel Report or traditional school instructional programs (41). These effects have been documented in studies using both quasiexperimental and switching replication designs (42, 43). In explaining CORI’s effectiveness, Guthrie, Wigfield, Barbosa, et al. (42) discussed how its motivation and strategy instruction practices likely interacted to influence student motivation and comprehension in positive ways. As students’ motivation increases they likely use the
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reading strategies more, which further improves their comprehension. Interestingly, CORI students’ reading strategy use (measured behaviorally) was higher than that of students in the strategy instruction condition, further showing the potential power of motivation in changing students’ cognitive approach to reading. Continuing to explore the complex relations and interactions of students’ motivation and cognitions as they engage in reading is a priority for future research.
Summary and Conclusions
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For many years the reading field was dominated by a focus on the cognitive processes and strategies involved in learning to read (41). As important as this work was and is to our understanding of the development of reading comprehension it did not include http:// www.wmata.com/index.cfm? http://www.wmata.com/index.cfm? enough attention to children’s motivation for reading. Teachers with extensive knowledge of the most effective reading strategies with which to instruct their children will only be successful to the extent that their students are motivated to learn and use those strategies.
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Over the last 20 years we have learned much about the nature of children’s reading motivation and how it relates to both the amount and types of reading children do, and their reading comprehension. We also have learned much about effective instructional practices that lead to improvements in elementary and middle school children’s reading motivation. Yet much research remains to be done with respect to understanding the development of children’s reading motivation and what kinds of interventions can improve it. With respect to understanding reading motivation most of the work to date has involved self-report measures. Such measures provide essential information about how children view their motivation, but they have many limitations, especially when used with young children. Teacher ratings of student motivation and engagement are one alternative; they are reliable and relate to different outcomes (19). However, researchers should explore observational and other types of measures of motivation, in reading and other areas.
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Regarding interventions, CORI remains the only broad scale classroom based instructional program that systematically incorporates teaching practices focused on motivation. Its effectiveness needs to be assessed in larger, randomized control trial studies. Also, it would be informative to examine whether a core subset of the motivation practices (whichever those might be) would be as effective as the entire set. Yeager and Walton (44) reviewed the research on brief, social psychological motivation interventions that focus on students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about school. Such interventions have been remarkably effective in improving students’ motivation and achievement in different areas. They should be assessed in reading as well. Finally, researchers studying the success of different intervention programs show that their effects are moderated by different child characteristics, including their gender, ethnicity, and achievement level (45). Such effects should be examined in future reading motivation intervention studies.
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45. Rosenzweig EQ, Wigfield A. STEM motivation interventions for adolescents: A promising start, but farther to go. Educational Psychologist. (in press).
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Child Dev Perspect. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 September 07. Published in final edited form as: Child Dev Perspect. 2016 September ; 10(3): 190–195. doi:10.1111/cdep.12184.
Beyond Cognition: Reading Motivation and Reading Comprehension Allan Wigfield, Jessica Gladstone, and Lara Turci Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland
Abstract Author Manuscript
The authors review research on children’s reading motivation and its relation to their reading comprehension. They begin by discussing work on the development of school motivation in general and reading motivation in particular, reviewing work showing that many children’s reading motivation declines over the school years. Girls tend to have more positive motivation for reading than do boys, and there are ethnic differences in children’s reading motivation. Over the last 15 years researchers have identified in both laboratory and classroom-based research instructional practices that positively impact students’ reading motivation and ultimately their reading comprehension. There is a strong need for researchers to build on this work and develop and study in different age groups of children effective classroom-based reading motivation instructional programs for a variety of narrative and informational materials.
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
In their Child Development Perspectives article on learning to read, Hulme and Snowling (1) stated"learning to read is a key objective of early education and difficulties in learning to read can have serious adverse consequences” (p. 1). They focused on cognitive explanations for early reading development. Here we build on their insightful paper by discussing reading motivation and its relation to children’s reading comprehension skills across the school years. Proficient reading comprehension is crucial for success in every academic domain, and particularly in courses focused on reading and literature (2). As students advance in their education, they are expected to read and write across a wide variety of disciplines with increasing skill, flexibility, and insight (3). Because reading materials become increasingly demanding in later childhood and adolescence, readers must be fluent in the processes of word decoding and recognition, continually expand their vocabularies and knowledge base, and learn to use elaborate cognitive strategies to make inferences and critically analyze text (4). Hulme and Snowling (1) discuss that the fluency of these skills is dependent upon development of earlier foundational reading abilities such as phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in early childhood, two essential components of reading words and sentences. Because of the hierarchical nature of reading skill development, slow growth along any of these dimensions can result in significant difficulty and negative consequences for students’ reading comprehension and achievement more generally as they progress through school (1). To master the skills and strategies just described children must commit time and effort to learn them; thus students must be motivated to learn and then utilize them fully.
Author contact information: Allan Wigfield, Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742. Address correspondence to: [email protected].
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Unfortunately, national statistics demonstrate that many children struggle with reading early in their education and continue to struggle throughout their school years. In 2015, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) found that 64% of fourth-grade, and 66% of eighth-grade, students were at or below proficiency (defined by NAEP as “solid academic performance”) for reading performance (5). Further, 31% of fourth-grade, and 24% of eighth-grade, students were at or below basic level, which means that they have only partially mastered the prerequisite knowledge and skills needed for successful academic performance. These statistics are very troubling, particularly because reading below grade level in third grade is among the strongest predictors of later school drop out (6).
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Reading performance and other achievement outcomes are even bleaker for students of color; the achievement gap between European American and African American students has only slightly narrowed since the inception of NAEP in 1992 (5). Students of color who have fallen behind grade level reading comprehension are especially susceptible to drop out of school (7). Paired with findings indicating that students of color are disproportionately affected by poverty, unemployment, and inadequate educational opportunities (8), the vulnerability of students of color for low reading comprehension and its negative outcomes is particularly troubling. Poor reading comprehension is thus an integrated component of the structural inequalities that serve as barriers to fruitful careers and higher education.
Author Manuscript
As efforts focused primarily on skill building and strategy instruction have continually failed to improve national student performance and narrow academic achievement gaps, some researchers have begun to focus on how children’s motivation to read relates to reading comprehension. We discuss this work in this article, beginning with how we and others define reading motivation. We then discuss how reading motivation develops, and relates to different achievement outcomes. We focus next on gender and ethnic differences in reading motivation and comprehension, followed by discussion of instructional programs designed to enhance children’s reading motivation and comprehension. We close with suggestions for future research.
Defining Reading Motivation
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Prominent theoretical models of achievement motivation focus on children’s beliefs, values, and goals as the primary “drivers” of their motivation (see 9, 10). Central motivational beliefs include competence-related beliefs such as self-efficacy, or one’s confidence in one’s ability to accomplish different tasks (11), and the sense of control and autonomy individuals have over their learning (12). When students believe they are efficacious at a given activity such as reading they do better, even when controlling for previous performance (11). Researchers also have discussed different ways in which individuals value activities, including how important they are to the individual, how useful they might be, and whether or not they are interested in the activity (13). Students’ valuing of activities such as reading are particularly important influences on their choice to do them. Researchers distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for different activities, with intrinsic motivation arising from the individual’s own self-expressed interests and extrinsic motivation based on outside influences such as rewards and grades. Ryan and Deci (12) reviewed much work showing that intrinsic motivation relates to longer-term engagement in achievement
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activities. Individuals have different kinds of goals and goal orientations for the achievement activities in which they engage, such as the goal of increasing one’s knowledge (mastery goal orientation), or the goal of outperforming others (performance goal orientation) (14). These goal orientations relate in systematic ways to different achievement outcomes (15) and it is important to note that many students hold both of them. Finally, although motivation often is considered an individual variable or characteristic, social context and social relations impact students’ motivation as well, particularly during the early adolescent years (2).
Development of Reading Motivation
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Wigfield et al. (10) review extant work on the development of children’s achievement motivation. In brief, many young children tend to have a strong sense of their competence for the different activities they do in school. Children also initially find most school activities to be interesting and exciting, resulting in enthusiasm and valuing of academic activities. Unfortunately, for many children this optimistic beginning does not last. Researchers have found children’s competence beliefs, intrinsic motivation, and valuing of academic subjects decrease across the school years (16). Researchers focusing on the development of reading motivation in particular generally have found decreases over age in reading attitudes and motivation (see 17, for review). For instance, McKenna, Kear, and Ellsworth’s (18) work on children’s attitudes toward reading shows that across the elementary school years, children report liking reading less each year. The 2015 NAEP report supports these findings and indicates that many children in middle school become actively resistant to engaging in reading (5). Guthrie, Klauda, and Morrison (8) found that middle school students overwhelmingly describe the information texts they read in science classes as boring, irrelevant, and difficult to understand—hardly a recipe for positive motivation to read this material. These changes in students’ competence beliefs, values, and intrinsic motivation have been explained in two main ways: Intrapersonal change and environmental change. Through the school years, children’s capacity to understand their own performance increases (see 10). They receive more and more feedback about their performance in school, and become more sophisticated at understanding its meaning. Evaluative information such as report cards and feedback about performance on academic projects and tests can lead some children to realize that they are not as capable as their peers; also potentially resulting in a decrease in intrinsic motivation to learn.
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A second (and related) explanation focuses on how certain evaluation practices contribute to the decline in some children’s motivation. Researchers and policy makers have discussed a variety of such practices (see 19 for detailed review). These practices include the following. Due to an increase in educational accountability at different levels, school administrators require teachers to implement more formal and frequent evaluations of their students. Practices that emphasize social comparison and encourage excessive competition among children (e.g., class ranking, spelling bees) may lead them to focus on how their skills compare to others. Such practices can deflate children’s competence beliefs, particularly those of children doing less well (see 20).
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Certain instructional practices can undermine children’s intrinsic motivation for learning as well. Instruction that makes few attempts to spark children’s interest and, as mentioned earlier, utilizes unappealing texts can decrease intrinsic motivation. If teachers overly restrict student choice of reading topics or materials, they risk stifling intrinsic motivation and autonomy (12). Finally, Assor, Kaplan, and Roth (21) found that when students do not see the relevance of what they are learning to their own values and goals, they are less engaged in learning.
Relations of Reading Motivation to Different Reading Outcomes
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But why should we be concerned about these declines? One major reason is that reading motivation is strongly associated with reading outcomes, such as students’ reading comprehension, use of effective strategies, and course grades (22). In this section we discuss how the motivational belief, value, and goal variables defined above relate to children’s reading outcomes. Students’ competence beliefs and self-efficacy Research has revealed that students reporting higher levels of self-efficacy and perceived competence obtained higher reading comprehension scores than students reporting lower levels of perceived competence, even when previous performance is controlled (11). Furthermore, students with high self-efficacy see difficult reading tasks as challenging and work towards mastering them, utilizing cognitive strategies productively in the process (11). High self-efficacy has also been found to improve performance on standardized reading tests in middle school students (23).
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Perceived autonomy The relationship between perceived autonomy and reading achievement has been well documented, particularly in elementary school students (24). Elementary school students’ perceived autonomy in the form of being allowed to select books to read and valuing book selection predicted their growth in reading comprehension across four months (24). Children who valued choosing their own books subsequently developed elaborate strategies for selecting books and reported being more intrinsically motivated readers. Students’ valuing of reading
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As noted earlier students’ valuing of reading and other subjects predict their choice of activities (13). Durik, Vida, and Eccles (25) found that children’s valuing of reading in fourth grade predicted their leisure time reading activities in 10th grade, and 10th grade students who valued reading read for career aspirations. Children’s valuing of reading also correlates with their reading achievement and engagement in school reading tasks at the primary and secondary school levels (26). Students’ intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation Student’s intrinsic motivation correlates positively with their reading achievement and predicts their reading achievement over time (27, 28). By contrast, Meece and Miller (29) found that students’ extrinsic motivation related to the use of surface strategies for reading
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and the desire to complete a task for a grade rather than to understand the task. These findings suggest that although extrinsic motivation is positively associated with reading grades it is less likely to positively influence reading comprehension (28). Students’ goal orientations Students with mastery goals make more metacognitive comments, paraphrase text more often, and make more connecting inferences than students who have a performance goal orientation (28); however, mastery goals often do not relate to indicators of performance like grades. By contrast, students’ performance goals do relate to their reading grades (28). Social motivation
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Children who like to participate in a group of learners by completing needed tasks are likely intrinsically motivated readers and subsequently have more positive reading outcomes (30). Social motivation also leads to increased amounts of reading, more effort, and higher levels of achievement in reading (31). In summary, students’ reading motivation correlates with their reading comprehension in important ways. Do these results apply to different kinds of students? We turn to that topic next.
Gender and Ethnic Differences in Reading Motivation and Comprehension There are important group-level differences in the patterns just discussed; we focus on gender and ethnic differences in children’s reading motivation and comprehension because they have been researched the most to date.
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Gender differences Researchers have found that throughout elementary and secondary school, females outperform males on various measures of reading achievement both in the U. S. (32) and in the PISA international comparison studies (33). Girls also report higher reading motivation than do boys (27, 34). Interestingly, Jacobs et al. (16) found that male and female students had similar competence beliefs in reading in the first two years of elementary school but both the male students’ competence beliefs and value of reading subsequently declined more rapidly than did females. These findings may reflect cultural expectations that females will be more positive about reading than males (35), and suggest that research needs to focus on improving male students’ competence beliefs and value of reading alongside current efforts to foster female students’ involvement in the sciences.
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Ethnic differences Although the research on this issue is more limited than that on gender differences, researchers have found that African American students report higher self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and valuing of reading than do their European American peers (27, 36), despite often performing more poorly on the reading outcomes measures.. In addition, the relation of children’s reading motivation to their performance varies across ethnic groups (27, 28, 37). Unrau and Schlackman (37) found that intrinsic motivation related more positively to
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reading achievement for Asian American students than for Latino students. Baker and Wigfield (27) found that European American students’ reading motivation related more strongly to their reading achievement than that of African American students, and Wang and Guthrie (28) found intrinsic motivation to relate positively, and extrinsic motivation to relate negatively, to text comprehension at similar levels for both American and Chinese students. These variations suggest the significance of ethnicity in shaping students’ reading motivation and the extent to which it affects academic performance, and thus should be explored further.
Instructional Programs to Enhance Reading Comprehension
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Given that many students’ reading motivation declines and their reading motivation relates to their comprehension, it is crucial to work with teachers and other educators to enhance students’ reading motivation. Researchers now have identified a set of instructional practices that can foster students’ reading motivation and engagement, focusing on the motivation constructs discussed earlier in this article (see 38 for review). These practices include facilitating students’ success to build their self-efficacy, helping them to see the importance and relevance of what they are learning, giving them some autonomy over their learning, and allowing many social interactions around reading.
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Researchers examining the effectiveness of these practices in laboratory studies that have focused on one of these practices have shown that they impact positively students’ reading motivation and comprehension (22, 38). We know of only one large scale classroom-based instruction program that has examined how a focus on reading motivation in classroom instructional practices impacts students’ reading motivation and comprehension: Concept Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). CORI was developed by Guthrie, Wigfield, and their colleagues (39, 40), and the instructional practices in CORI focus on enhancing children’s reading motivation and comprehension within a content domain—usually science or social studies. In CORI teachers provide reading strategy instruction and also implement teaching practices that focus on enhancing the motivation variables just described: Students’ selfefficacy, autonomy, value of reading, intrinsic motivation, and collaboration in reading. For instance, to enhance students’ perceived autonomy in reading students are given many choices regarding what they read. To enhance their self-efficacy teachers ensure students at all reading levels experience success with the materials they are reading.
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At both the elementary and middle school levels, students who experienced CORI had higher reading motivation, greater engagement in reading, and higher reading comprehension for different reading activities than did students in strategy-instruction only conditions (in which they were taught a variety of successful reading strategies as documented in the National Reading Panel Report or traditional school instructional programs (41). These effects have been documented in studies using both quasiexperimental and switching replication designs (42, 43). In explaining CORI’s effectiveness, Guthrie, Wigfield, Barbosa, et al. (42) discussed how its motivation and strategy instruction practices likely interacted to influence student motivation and comprehension in positive ways. As students’ motivation increases they likely use the
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reading strategies more, which further improves their comprehension. Interestingly, CORI students’ reading strategy use (measured behaviorally) was higher than that of students in the strategy instruction condition, further showing the potential power of motivation in changing students’ cognitive approach to reading. Continuing to explore the complex relations and interactions of students’ motivation and cognitions as they engage in reading is a priority for future research.
Summary and Conclusions
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For many years the reading field was dominated by a focus on the cognitive processes and strategies involved in learning to read (41). As important as this work was and is to our understanding of the development of reading comprehension it did not include http:// www.wmata.com/index.cfm? http://www.wmata.com/index.cfm? enough attention to children’s motivation for reading. Teachers with extensive knowledge of the most effective reading strategies with which to instruct their children will only be successful to the extent that their students are motivated to learn and use those strategies.
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Over the last 20 years we have learned much about the nature of children’s reading motivation and how it relates to both the amount and types of reading children do, and their reading comprehension. We also have learned much about effective instructional practices that lead to improvements in elementary and middle school children’s reading motivation. Yet much research remains to be done with respect to understanding the development of children’s reading motivation and what kinds of interventions can improve it. With respect to understanding reading motivation most of the work to date has involved self-report measures. Such measures provide essential information about how children view their motivation, but they have many limitations, especially when used with young children. Teacher ratings of student motivation and engagement are one alternative; they are reliable and relate to different outcomes (19). However, researchers should explore observational and other types of measures of motivation, in reading and other areas.
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Regarding interventions, CORI remains the only broad scale classroom based instructional program that systematically incorporates teaching practices focused on motivation. Its effectiveness needs to be assessed in larger, randomized control trial studies. Also, it would be informative to examine whether a core subset of the motivation practices (whichever those might be) would be as effective as the entire set. Yeager and Walton (44) reviewed the research on brief, social psychological motivation interventions that focus on students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about school. Such interventions have been remarkably effective in improving students’ motivation and achievement in different areas. They should be assessed in reading as well. Finally, researchers studying the success of different intervention programs show that their effects are moderated by different child characteristics, including their gender, ethnicity, and achievement level (45). Such effects should be examined in future reading motivation intervention studies.
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