How Reading Motivation and Engagement Enable Reading Achievement: Policy Implications

S: Sharing

The S in SMILE denotes how sharing or social connections may promote reading motivation and engagement. Relatedness to others is one of the three universal psychological needs that motivates humans to act, according to SDT (Ryan & Deci, 2000), and positive social relations at school play a crucial role in students’ academic dispositions and success (Eccles & Wang, 2012; Wentzel, 2010). Teachers who regularly encourage collaboration among students for reading activities help satisfy this need for social connection and thereby may not just promote shared reading but deeper reading. When students have an authentic reading purpose of communicating information and viewpoints about a text with others, they are often motivated to read more closely and think harder about the text’s meaning (Rozendaal et al., 2005). This means that they are more motivated to invest cognitive effort in such key reading comprehension–related processes as (a) determining unfamiliar vocabulary; (b) making local inferences, which connect information within the text; and (c) making global inferences, which connect the text to personal knowledge and experience (Cain & Oakhill, 2014) to build knowledge from text, a key outcome from reading comprehension. When students collaborate in reading, they may not only learn content from each other, but also how their peers feel about reading. Peer attitudes can either affirm or undermine students’ reading motivation (Guthrie, Mason-Singh, & Coddington, 2012).

How can teachers capitalize on the power of social motivation to promote not just instructional engagement in a given lesson but sustained engagement in reading? One option is to adopt a specific, research-supported collaborative instructional method, such as reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1986) or collaborative reasoning (Chinn et al., 2001), which provides a defined structure for working together to comprehend text. For instance, in reciprocal teaching groups, students become the question generator, clarifier, predictor, or summarizer. In addition, teachers may form discussion groups that meet regularly to share understanding of and reactions to assigned or chosen texts or have student groups work on a research project in a jigsaw manner that requires synthesizing material that each student shares with the group. The activities may also consistently include brief but meaningful opportunities for students to engage in reading and related activities together, such as think-pair-share activities like generating inferences from an assigned passage (Guthrie & Klauda, 2016).

M: Me

The M in SMILE captures how students’ perception “of me” as a reader—or their feelings of self-efficacy—play a major role in their proclivity toward reading. Students who have reading self-efficacy believe that they can succeed in reading tasks (Bandura, 1997; Schunk & Pajares, 2009) and thus are more likely to put in the necessary effort to make sense of their reading. Reading self-efficacy may mean different things to students of different ages—for instance, confidence in word recognition, in the primary grades, but in comprehension ability by middle school—and may vary for different kinds of reading genres (e.g., for information books vs. novels; Ho & Guthrie, 2013). Self-efficacy development depends on students performing well in reading—and being aware of that performance. Thus, the key instructional practice for promoting self-efficacy is ensuring success in reading. Although a basic feeling of confidence in one’s reading ability may be necessary for undertaking reading (Schiefele et al., 2012), reading experiences with positive achievement outcomes in turn strengthen self-efficacy.

Teachers can use evidence-based practices to ensure reading success for every student. One long-standing practice, based on goal-setting in self-efficacy development (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2007), has been for teachers to help students set reachable—but increasingly challenging—goals for their reading, such as how many new concepts they will learn through reading in a given week (Guthrie & Klauda, 2016). As students see themselves meeting each new goal, their self-efficacy grows, motivating them to set optimally challenging goals (Zimmerman, 2008), and increasing the time they spend reading, which helps further build their reading skills.

Teachers can also facilitate students’ success in reading by providing them opportunities to develop background knowledge on the focal topic before reading about it. Background knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension (Cromley & Azevedo, 2007); the more one knows about a topic, the easier it is to connect new information from reading and increase one’s overall understanding of it (Kintsch & Kintsch, 2005). Teachers can help students develop background knowledge through class discussions, compelling videos, brief experiments, photograph displays, and other means.

Two other methods of fostering reading self-efficacy work in close conjunction with each other. One is making sure that students at all reading levels have appropriately difficult texts for both free reading and instruction, that is, texts they can read fluently and comprehend literally by themselves, and comprehend at a deeper level with guidance (Guthrie & Klauda, 2016). In CORI and USHER, this guidance has meant strategy instruction, including emphasis at the elementary level on such strategies as questioning, information searching, and graphic organizing, and at the middle school level on making inferences, summarizing, and drawing concept maps (Taboada Barber, Buehl, et al., 2015, 2018; Wigfield et al., 2014); such strategies enrich understanding of and memory for key text points. In fact, self-efficacy (and intrinsic motivation) connects to diverse reading strategies (Law, 2009; Schaffner & Schiefele, 2007).

Another way of fostering reading self-efficacy is linking it with choice or autonomy support—two important motivation practices reviewed later. So strong are the relations among choice, perceived control, and feelings of self-efficacy that student choice may be less beneficial when divorced from self-efficacy. For example, having choice was more beneficial when it provided an opportunity to demonstrate self-efficacy (Burger, 1989). In our own work, when middle school DLLs who struggle with reading are provided with effective feedback on the use of cognitive strategies, they become better at choosing what strategies to apply to specific texts, that is, their increased competence helps them make better choices (Taboada Barber, 2016).

I: Importance

Readers who show sustained engagement also value reading as a means of developing knowledge and understanding; in other words, the I in SMILE stands for importance, as engaged readers possess solid conviction that reading is useful in their current and future lives. Importance as a dimension of reading motivation stems from EVT (e.g., Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). EVT posits four dimensions of valuing, importance and usefulness being two of them, which, when paired with high personal expectancies for success, affect individuals’ activity choices and achievement (Durik et al., 2006). Value for reading becomes more closely associated with students’ reading competence as they grow older (Ho & Guthrie, 2013).

In EVT, socializers, including teachers, facilitate students’ valuing in particular domains, such as reading. Specifically, teachers promote value for reading by emphasizing its importance and usefulness for learning and achievement. One such means of fostering value for reading is providing students a verbal or written rationale for their assigned reading—or asking students to think or write about the benefits that may come from a particular reading. This strategy effectively improves students’ perceived value of reading tasks, as found when prospective teachers read about statistics (Jang, 2008) and seventh graders read about science (Guthrie, Mason-Singh, & Coddington, 2012).

For younger students, more structured, concrete activities may help them recognize the value of reading; for instance, in CORI, teachers ask students to reflect on whether they learned the most about a topic through, for instance, a brief video, book, or peer discussion; typically, students report that they learned the most from reading (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2017).

Contemporary EVTs (Eccles et al., 1983; Eccles & Wigfield, 2002) also assert that the choices that people make when given autonomy in decision-making are influenced by beliefs about how well they will do on an immediate or future task and the extent to which the activity is valued. Therefore, teachers’ efforts to instill the value of reading, whether through its meaningfulness or usefulness, or both, are key to nurturing their students’ academic choices about reading.

L: Liking

The L in SMILE refers to liking, as engaged readers have a true liking or enjoyment of reading, not just in a particular context (e.g., when a teacher expressively reads a funny poem) but as a stable, individual characteristic (e.g., when a child has a consistent, long-term interest in reading a certain genre). That is, such students are driven by the feelings of pleasure and involvement they experience while reading, not extrinsically motivated to read for some reward; reading is an end in itself. The construct of intrinsic motivation is rooted in both EVT (e.g., Eccles & Wigfield, 2002) and SDT (e.g., Ryan & Deci, 2000). Within SDT, feeling in control of outcomes enhances individuals’ intrinsic motivation, whereas perceiving the environment as controlling diminishes it (Deci et al., 1989). Autonomy support refers to a style for motivating individuals by encouraging their interests and promoting internalization of the value of learning (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Classrooms lacking autonomy support—those in which teachers provide extrinsic rewards for progressing toward the goals they set (Jang et al., 2010; Reeve & Jang, 2006)—can conversely weaken intrinsic motivation (Assor et al., 2005).

Although students may possess more or less intrinsic reading motivation as a personal characteristic, experiences of autonomy support for reading have positive effects, immediate and cumulative (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2017). Teachers can provide autonomy support for reading and thereby bolster intrinsic motivation by fostering relevance and affording choice, as these practices encourage students to link their reading to their interests, preferences, and sense of control (Assor et al., 2002; Wigfield et al., 2014). Making reading relevant can mean getting to know student interests and purposefully selecting readings that align with them—for instance, a second-grade teacher assigning a baseball-loving student a biography about Roberto Clemente for the Black History Month book report. It can also mean arranging experiences that are culturally relevant for DLLs or culturally diverse students, as when helping students choose books that relate to their mores, countries, and communities (e.g., Taboada Barber, 2016).

Despite abundant research suggesting that choice is a powerful motivator, how choices are offered (such as when choices require high cognitive load) can produce no effect, or even a negative effect, on motivation and performance (Reeve et al., 2003). Thus, when affording choice to students, teachers must consider the following: What are meaningful choices? And what are reasonable choices? Meaningful choices give students a true sense of autonomy about their learning, with real consequences. For instance, picking what color post-its to mark key passages in a text is not a meaningful choice; deciding which text to read is (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2017). Reasonable choices are appropriate, given the students’ developmental level or familiarity with the activity (Wigfield et al., 2014). For instance, students should not choose which reading strategy to use before they have sufficient practice with each one (e.g., Taboada Barber, Buehl, et al., 2015). In addition, teachers may give primary grade children just two or three options, but give adolescent readers open-ended choices (Ivey & Johnston, 2013). Teachers can embed multiple, significant choices in most reading lessons, helping students regularly experience learning autonomy, and thereby grow intrinsic motivation (Guthrie & Klauda, 2016).

E: Engagement

Engagement (active involvement in reading) is the direct product of motivation (values, goals, and beliefs). Students who share reading, feel efficacious as readers, believe reading is important, and experience intrinsic pleasure in reading are more likely to invest the time and effort needed to fully comprehend texts. Beyond the preceding four practices—which support engagement through their effects on motivation—are other important considerations for teachers and school administrators striving to facilitate students’ development into engaged readers.

One critical consideration is simply time spent reading. Motivation practices are only meaningful if they increase the time students spend immersed in sustained reading—not in direct literacy instruction or in practicing discrete reading comprehension skills (e.g., identifying the main idea of a single paragraph). During independent reading, students must coordinate multiple cognitive processes—for example, decoding, vocabulary, making inferences, monitoring their understanding—to arrive at deep comprehension of an extended text (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2017). Indeed, reading amount (as a proxy for time spent reading) has consistently shown associations with intrinsic motivation (controlling for other relevant variables, such as prior knowledge and achievement, grade level, parental education, reading efficacy, and extrinsic motivation, among others; e.g., Durik et al., 2006; Wang & Guthrie, 2004). Time spent in authentic reading enables students to build and reinforce their overall reading comprehension capacity, which is critical for their success in all academic subjects and for finding pleasure in recreational reading.

Accordingly, students cannot spend such time immersed in reading if they do not have interesting, diverse texts available to them—books, articles, websites, and other resources. And, as noted, students should be able to select books for independent reading well matched to their current capacity. For information texts, librarians or teachers should ensure that offerings are user-friendly and include accurate, up-to-date, appealing content. Regarding fictional texts, an oft-asked question is whether to restrict them to classic and contemporary “literature” or other more popular genres, such as mysteries, animal series, and graphic novels. In the middle grades and beyond, deep engagement can transpire when students have broad choices in and out of school (Ivey & Johnston, 2013). Engagement in any kind of text may not always facilitate achievement, but when teachers take interest in student reading choices—whether current bestsellers, music lyrics, or sports articles—and help students connect their reading to the required curriculum, it indeed promotes learning (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002). In a meta-analysis of 99 studies, reading volume related moderately to strongly with reading comprehension, from the elementary years to early adulthood (Mol & Bus, 2011).

Finally, implementing motivation-supporting practices as a coordinated set is important for fully supporting students’ development into engaged readers. Students’ sustained reading engagement is not driven just by their reading experience of enjoying collaboration, feeling efficacious, finding reading important, or simply liking it. Rather, children and adolescents will be the most engaged when they possess a variety of motivations, so, for example, when faced with a reading task they find boring (i.e., not intrinsically motivating), they still persist because they know they are competent readers (i.e., have self-efficacy) and perceive the task’s usefulness (i.e., have task value). If driven by a single motivation dimension—intrinsic motivation in this example—their reading engagement would likely break down. This perspective spurred the design of reading intervention programs, such as CORI and USHER (Taboada Barber, Buehl, et al., 2015, 2018) that focus on implementing both cognitive strategy instruction and motivation supports in a carefully sequenced, integrated manner over weeks to months. These programs have produced clear effects on reading comprehension, engagement, and motivation, for elementary and middle school students (e.g., Guthrie & Klauda, 2014; Wigfield et al., 2014) and students from varying language backgrounds (e.g., English Learners and native English speakers; Taboada Barber, Buehl, et al., 2015, 2018).