Margin Notes

It’s not just about skills: Adopting a motivation-informed approach to instruction with adolescents by Kristin Conradi Smith, Bong Gee Jang, and Tori J. Ostot (Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2024)

“Motivation, literally rooted in the Latin word “movere” has to do with what moves us to do something. When we talk about reading motivation, thus, we’re really considering what compels or inclines a student to participate (or not participate) in the reading activity or task. Though some research suggests that adolescents can be profiled as being highly motivated, ambivalent, or having low motivation (Syal et al., 2024), other research suggests the relationship is less clear and more context dependent (Retelsdorf et al., 2024). In fact, it is important to consider the dynamic and context-dependent nature of motivation, rather than relying solely on static categories that might inadvertently lead to deficit-oriented perceptions of students.”

Summary

While motivation-informed approaches benefit all students, the authors center this article on recent research with a particular focus on adolescents who have had struggles with reading and on students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds who have often been ignored in research. This research confirms that students who have struggled with reading tend to avoid reading and perceive it as too difficult. These perspectives are considered “undermining motivation.”

Situated expectancy value theory (SEVT) suggests that students are motivated by whether they expect to be successful with a task or activity and whether they value it. Situational aspects of reading motivation include the purpose for reading, reading locations, text genres, and text topics.

A variety of factors have been identified as fostering adolescent readers’ motivation; however, two aspects matter most when designing and delivering instruction and interventions for adolescents:

1. Interest and Relevance

• In a meta-analysis of over 39 motivation-related interventions, interest played the most important role in improving students’ intrinsic motivation and achievement.
• When students are given choice in reading materials and those materials align with their interests and cultural backgrounds, they are more likely to engage with the text, resulting in higher comprehension and retention.
• Students see the relevance of what they are reading when teachers select texts that reflect relatable topics and themes.
• This is especially important for students who have been marginalized by conventional educational practices—the lack of culturally relevant texts leads to diminished engagement in reading and writing.

2. Self-beliefs

• Students’ self-efficacy (their estimation of whether they can complete a task) and their perceptions of difficulty (whether they believe the task at hand will be too difficult for them) play a substantial role in motivation.
• Teachers can address students’ self-beliefs by:
  • ensuring students feel confident they can access text
  • incorporating goal-setting strategies so students know expectations
  • providing positive and specific feedback

Takeaways For the Classroom

The authors identify four key principles for teachers to keep in mind when working with adolescent learners:

1. Adopt an assets-based approach to classwork and assignments.

• An assets-based approach means recognizing and valuing students’ diverse identities and funds of knowledge.
• Teachers should make it a priority to recognize students’ strengths and potentials and design classroom activities and assignments to create opportunities for success and confidence-building.
• Emphasizing the importance of developing and applying their strengths fosters a growth mindset in students, which increases engagement, perseverance, and academic achievement.
• In an intervention setting, rather than starting the lesson with a focus on what students don’t know, approach it instead by highlighting previous skills mastered and connect what students already know to the new learning.

 

2. Acknowledge the role of self-efficacy.

• Self-efficacy is a student’s judgement about whether they will be successful with a given task. This expectancy is a major factor in students’ motivation.
• Breaking assignments into concrete steps and providing actionable directions means that students can experience small successes along the way.
• This is further supported by providing growth-oriented and specific feedback.

3. Ground learning in meaningful texts and tasks.

• Organizing text sets around themes or issues that are important to readers encourages them to make text-to-text and text-to-self connections, which increases engagement.
• Incorporating an element of choice related to the tasks students will participate in during and after reading allows students to select tasks that are meaningful or interesting to them.

4. Capitalize on opportunities for language use.

• Relationships influence students’ motivation for engaging with reading.
• Adolescents in particular are motivated when they work with each other.
• Participation in book clubs has been shown to increase engagement and reading comprehension.

Conclusion

“As we consider working with adolescents who still need work on foundational skills, we would do them a particular disservice if we ignored the key roles that motivation will play in facilitating that learning.”