Ready4Reading Evidence Portfolio
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instructional conditions for reading to be an accessible, enjoyable, engaging, and meaningful experience, teachers better position students to read more often, more widely, and more consistently (Blevins, 2019; Slavin, 2009; Duff, Tomblin, & Catts, 2015; Stanovich, 1986; 2000). As such, developing students’ motivation and engagement with reading is a crucial aspect of literacy development that requires attention from teachers. Reading motivation refers to “an individual’s personal goals, values, and beliefs about the topics, processes, and outcomes of reading,” while reading engagement “refers to an individual’s actual involvement in reading, as reflected in behavior, affect, or cognition” (Barber & Klauda, 2020, p. 28). Experts agree that positive motivation produces increased reading engagement — which in turn promotes reading success and positions students to be more interested in reading overall (Afferblach & Harrison, 2017). Several systematic reviews of empirical evidence have found a strong correlation between motivation and the frequency at which students read (Bates et al., 2016; Blevins, 2019; Borman et al., 2007; Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998; Duff et al., 2015; Stanovich, 1986; 2000; Schiefele et al., 2016), as well as a strong relationship between reading motivation, engagement, and literacy skills from preschool through high school (Guthrie et al., 2012; Ryan & Deci, 2002; Toste et al., 2020). The reasons for this are not surprising — students who are interested in a task or activities tend to engage longer, demonstrate greater effort and self-regulation, and generally exhibit greater learning outcomes than those experiencing less engagement (Harackiewicz et al., 2008; Renninger & Hidi, 2002; Reilly, Laurenzano, & Morrison, 2021). Moreover, one of the more widely studied phenomena related to children’s literacy development is the “Matthew E ffect” ( Duff, Tomblin, & Catts, 2015; Stanovich, 1986; 2000) — a widely observed phenomena in which children who experience success and enjoyment with reading tend to read more often and more widely, and thus performance differences between good and poor readers tend to increase over time (Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Litwin & Pepin, 2020; Stanovich, 1986; Walberg & Tsai, 1983). Put simply, students who read more often tend to become better readers than those who read less, and when children enjoy reading, they tend to do it more frequently (Litwin & Pepin, 2020). In light of these trends, making sure that reading is accessible to students and also an engaging and enjoyable experience during the early years of school is a concern of significant consequence for early elementary educators (Slavin, 2009; Blevins, 2019; Borman et al., 2007; Fairbanks et al., 2014). Fortunately, research in education psychology points to a variety of factors that can improve students’ reading motivation, including 1) strengthening student autonomy over choices related to a task; 2) fostering a sense of competence for completing a learning task; 3) encouraging tasks that are perceived as interesting; and 4) promoting relatedness or opportunities to make connections with other students (Brand et al., 2021; Deci & Ryan, 2008; 1985; Gambrell, 2011; McRae & Guthrie, 2009; Ryan & Deci, 2000; 2017). Techniques such as these, when situated as part of instructional programming that balances explicit targeted instruction of literacy skills with authentic opportunities to engage in independent reading (Blevins, 2019), appear to yield large dividends in te rms of students’ engagement with reading as well as their propensity to read frequently. As discussed in the section that follows, Ready4Reading seeks to explicitly address these aims through a variety of key program components and procedures.
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