A reader, inside and out

Sabina Rak Neugebauer

Literacy development is one of the most accurate predictors of academic success with motivation to read being a central component of that development. The documented decrease in reading motivation in adolescence is concerning for educators because of the strong association between reading motivation and reading performance. This motivational decline is generally identified using measures of reading motivation that do not attend to the reading practices of adolescents. Existing assessments assume that reading motivation is relatively fixed over short periods of time; daily shifts in the level of motivation as a function of the setting or type of text being read are not explored as meaningful indicators. However, qualitative research has demonstrated that adolescents are motivated to read different text types for a variety of purposes across settings. To my knowledge, there is no...