Motivation and Adolescent and Adult Readers

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Motivation and Adolescent and Adult Readers

• Heidi Davey
• Hoffman Estates High School
• Northern Illinois University
• hdavey_at_d211.org
• 085 7528863

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• Everything from finding and choosing a text, to
  choosing to sit down with the text, to enacting
  strategic reading processes, to incorporating new
  information into prior knowledge requires active
  will and therefore motivation.
• Guthrie Wigfield, 2000

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What We Know
Data from Research and Experience

• General academic motivation declines throughout
  adolescence.
• Relative motivation among peers remains
  consistent.
• Many adolescents and adults can read, but choose
  not to they choose aliterate lives.
• Motivation is multifaceted and the decision to
  act or not act is determined by a variety of
  individual factors and how they interact.

Gerstens, 2002 Gottfried, Fleming Gottfried,
2001 Hidi Harackiewicz, 2000 Mikulecky, 1978
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Irish Context

• Students at or below level 2 in PISA
• 2000 27.9
• 2003 43.2
• Almost 82 get Leaving Certificate
• Adults at or below level 2
• Over 50

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Aliteracy

• the aliterate far outnumber the illiterate
  population, but have little advantage over them
• school systems focus on skill building and
  functional literacy - when reading and writing
  are seen as requirements of the job of school
  and not valuable in their own right, students
  will choose to only read when the job demands it
• Types of aliteracy dormant (having positive
  attitudes but too busy to read), uncommitted
  (having negative attitudes but open to the
  possibility of developing positive attitudes),
  and unmotivated (having a negative attitude that
  they predict will persist)
• each individual develops an aliterate stance as a
  result of personal interactions with texts,
  society, and self.

Beers, 1996 Mikulecky, 1978
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Oh, No!!

• Whatever can we do?!?

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General Motivational Orientation

• Intrinsic - engagement in a reading activity by
  choice and for its own sake deep involvement
  that fulfills a desire to learn or know
• Extrinsic - engagement in a reading activity for
  the purpose of receiving some external, usually
  surface level reward or recognition, such as
  praise or positive evaluation, or avoidance of
  punishment desire to complete the reading task
  rather than understand it

Deci, 1992, as cited in Guthrie Wigfield, 2000
and Schiefele, 1999 Guthrie Wigfield, 1999
Meece Miller, 1999 Schiefele, 1999
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Goal Orientation

• the purposes set for a particular reading task
• learning goals - increased competence and
  understanding
• performance or ego goals - external rewards such
  as praise, grades, or feelings of superiority
• work avoidant goals - task completion involving
  as little effort as possible and with little
  concern about quality

Guthrie Wigfield, 2000 Dweck Leggett, 1988
Guthrie Wigfield, 1999
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Interest

• Personal interest - long lasting and relatively
  stable interest in a topic that is individual
  specific
• Situational interest - fleeting interest
  brought about by contextual features such as the
  text, the environment, or the influence of other
  people, common across individuals
• Seductive details - may actually draw readers
  attention away from the portions of the text that
  carry meaning, thereby interfering with learning.
  
• interest is not synonymous with liking
• affects duration and frequency of text
  involvement, the mode of learning, and the
  functional state of learner resulting in
  (arousal, effortless concentration, availability
  of processing resources) all of which improve
  learning

Hidi, 1990 Hidi Harackiewicz, 2000 Schraw,
Bruning Svoboda, 1995
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Self Efficacy

• the readers belief that he/she has the
  capabilities to succeed at a particular reading
  task
• Bandura-high self-efficacy within a particular
  domain or task increases engagement, persistence,
  strategy use, task performance while decreasing
  anxiety
• more willing to engage in more challenging tasks,
  persist longer, and have less adverse reactions
  to failure
• set broader goals and engage more deeply in texts

Gottfried, 1985 Hidi, Berndorff Ainley, 2002
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Self-Regulation

• individuals can learn to engage in strategies,
  such as game creation, to make uninteresting
  tasks more interesting or enjoyable
• training in self-regulation important in
  maintaining literacy development during
  adolescence.
• dependent upon a belief that readers and learners
  have agency
• is enhanced by transaction belief systems, and is
  correlated to learning goals and academic success

Baum, Owen, Oreck, 1997
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Prior Knowledge

• Acclimated learners tend to exhibit low
  motivation, low knowledge bases and unstructured
  learning processes
• Proficient readers tend to exhibit ease in
  comprehension, high levels of interest and
  motivation and highly strategic reading processes
• critical component for both motivation and
  comprehension more critical in more advanced and
  more technical texts
• tutorials designed to increase topic knowledge
  were found to dramatically increase writing
  amount, particularly if the topics were of low
  interest

Alexander, Jetton Kulikowich, 1995 Hidi
McLaren, 1991 Schiefele, 1992
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Text Features

• text cohesion, clarity, structure and ease of
  comprehension were found to be the sources of
  interest most highly correlated to perceived
  interest
• limit the insertion of greater interestingness to
  improving conveyance of the main idea rather than
  focusing on seductive details

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Affective Responses

• increase the chance of future engagement,
  increased competency and increased motivation
• triggered by topic interest and results in
  greater persistence, which, in turn, is highly
  correlated to recall
• central to the initiation of cognitive processing
  skills, prerequisite to the development of
  autonomously motivated readers
• affective- cognitive synthesis can result in
  undivided interest and maintained attention and
  motivation
• personal responses may be seen to help
  engagement, but they are not necessarily involved
  in the creation of new meaning.
• significant predictors of text recall, while
  importance was not

Ainley, Hidi Berndorff, 2002 Ainley, Hillman
Hidi, 2002 Hidi Harackiewicz, 2000 Sadoski
Quast, 1990
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Helplessness

• helpless students respond very differently to
  failure than do mastery-oriented students
• students who have internalized a sense of
  helplessness attribute failure internally -
  negative competency perceptions, or externally -
  the task impossible or too confusing or the
  teacher or system unfair.
• mastery-oriented students expressed high levels
  of competency perceptions and did not make
  attributional comments at all, even when
  receiving equal amounts of failure feedback -
  verbalized problem-solution cognitions or
  enjoyment of challenge perceptions.

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Motivational Interactions
How the factors work together
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Our Students
What this means for the classroom

• Struggling readers, in particular, need increases
  in motivation in order to risk effort in a
  process where they have already experienced
  repeated failure (Taylor Mcatee, 2003).
• Transaction-based instructional models and belief
  systems are believed to increase reading
  motivation by privileging the readers role in
  the process, thereby increasing reader
  investment, the priority of the reading goals,
  and the number of cognitive processes employed
  during reading such as inferring and creating
  hypotheses.
• Transmission models and beliefs tend to decrease
  autonomy and increase reader compliance thereby
  reducing motivation to actively engage in the
  reading process and employ cognitive processes
• Intrinsically motivating act of social discourse
  - students have linked increased interest in and
  appreciation of books to the opportunity to
  express their opinions and have discussions about
  what they are reading (Baumann Hooten, 1999)

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Womens Literacy

• How do they define themselves?
• What are their goals? Dreams?
• What are the contexts that they value?
• What are the practical barriers?
• Is it collaborative?

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Developing Literate Boys

• Is it active?
• Is it social?
• Is it immediately applicable?
• Is there immediate feedback?
• Is there an affective connection?
• Is it competitive?

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Working with Adults vs. Adolescents

• goal orientation personal vs. social
• gratification delayed vs. immediacy
• learning styles collaborative vs. competitive
• participant vs. avoidant

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Final Thoughts
reality in the classroom

• How often one becomes involved with a topic is
  only of secondary importance. Of greater
  relevance is how a person goes about occupying
  him/herself with the topic at hand, and what
  level topic-related cognitive processing actually
  reaches
• Each literacy act in which an individual chooses
  to engage requires the motivation to act, the
  motivation to persist in activity, and the
  motivation to engage in certain cognitive and
  affective practices that will result in
  comprehension.
• Not only must we provide these motivational
  factors in our classrooms, more importantly, we
  must empower students to create them for
  themselves

(Schiefele Krapp, 1988, p. 11).