NICHD Grant

Identification, Prediction, and Intervention in Adolescent Reading
Principal Investigator: John T. Guthrie
Co-Principal Investigator: Allan Wigfield

This research addresses the current dual crises of low reading achievement and low motivation for academic reading in early adolescence, which little empirical work has addressed. The goals of our research include (1) developing a deeper and broader understanding of adolescents' reading motivation, (2) modeling its relations with reading comprehension, and (3) designing instruction based on the engagement model of reading that reduces adolescents' avoidance of academic reading, increases their intrinsic reading motivation, and improves their reading comprehension.

The research will consist of three highly interrelated studies. Study 1 will identify and quantify the motivations that adolescents have for approaching reading activities, as well as the reasons they have for resisting and actively avoiding reading. It will involve in-depth interviews with equal numbers of African American and Caucasian seventh graders. It is especially important that the sample fully represent African American students because their academic motivation has been understudied and because they continue to score lower than Caucasian students on reading tests like the NAEP.

The purpose of Study 2 is to examine the effects of reading motivation, including intrinsic motivation and avoidance, and cognitive processes involved in reading, including fluency, vocabulary, and inferencing, on adolescents' reading comprehension growth. We will use the results of Study 1 to develop a questionnaire that measures reading resistance, a construct that has received little attention in the quantitative reading literature. Analyses will be conducted to determine the extent to which the motivation and cognitive variables make unique contributions to comprehension growth. In addition, we are hypothesizing that motivation directly affects comprehension growth and indirectly affects it by influencing cognitive processes. We will test this hypothesis for both African American and Caucasian students.

Study 3 will involve designing, implementing and evaluating instruction for low-achieving adolescents that is aimed at decreasing avoidance and increasing intrinsic motivation for reading, and thereby improve reading comprehension. The results of Studies 1 and 2 will help define exactly what we are intervening to change and ensure that we are targeting meaningful variables, that is, those that do affect reading achievement. Two forms of Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) will be implemented, a program that has been effective in the third through fifth grades, but not studied with older children. CORI 1 will include two of the practices from the engagement model: perceived control in reading and collaboration in reading activities. In CORI 2, these same two practices will be implemented, plus support for cognitive competence and connection of reading to experience and knowledge from non-literacy activities.

We will examine whether CORI 1 and CORI 2 affect students differentially depending on their motivational characteristics. Specifically, we are hypothesizing that (1) CORI 1 especially will impact students who are motivated to read by extrinsic factors like grades and recognition, but they may lack feelings of control and relationships to others in reading activities, which are characteristics of intrinsically motivated readers, and (2) that CORI 2 especially will impact highly resistant readers because in addition to lacking control and collaboration, such students, unlike extrinsically motivated readers, may not feel skilled in reading or recognize the relevance of reading to their lives. We will also compare the effects of CORI and traditional reading instruction, which usually lacks explicit motivational supports. Study 3 will thus add to the limited empirical knowledge base about how classroom supports for reading motivation and engagement affect adolescents.

The project described (from August 2007- May 2012) is supported by Grant Number R01HD052590 from the National Institute Of Child Health And Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute Of Child Health And Human Development or the National Institutes of Health.