This semester, I am taking a research methods class in which
I have to develop a research proposal.
As I think through the ideas I am considering, I wanted to put some
thoughts down on (virtual) paper to help me process. Feel free to share your thoughts with me.
As a lifelong reader, I would love for all of my students to
experience the heightened academic success and pure joy that reading has
brought to me. As I reflect on my
decade-long volunteering and observations in an elementary library, settle in
to my third year of working as a librarian, and progress through my MLIS
studies, however, I am left with the unsettled feeling that we are doing it all
wrong. Fine investigative journalism
pieces like those of Emily Hanford for American Public Media* show that educational
leaders have ignored – for decades – what the research shows about how children
learn to read. As a result, we too often
lay a foundation for reading on a flimsy program that promotes reading proficiency
and beyond only for a small group of “native” readers – those who will “get it”
no matter the instruction.
The research in human development also tells us that
extrinsic rewards rarely build intrinsic motivation. For people to want to do things, they need to
want to do the thing for the thing itself, for how it makes them feel internally,
not for some carrot like praise, a bookmark, a pizza party, or a new ipod.**
Yet in the modern school library incentivized programming that
relies on extrinsic motivation is not only common-place but ubiquitous.
These programs are often a collaboration (or
conspiracy) between the ELA/reading instructional teachers and staff and the
librarian.
Read the most pages and get a
shirt, pizza, and a plaque at the Georgia Tech Women’s Basketball game!
Read the most minutes and win an iPod!
Read the most books and get $2,000 for your
librarian!
They can also involve
collaborations between the public library and school library for summer
reading.
Most of the research on this type of programming centers on either
summer reading programs or Accelerated Reader (AR) or similar programs, like Reading
Counts, and not on grass-roots programs like the Georgia Tech Buzzer Readers
program.
Decades-old research on these
programs show no benefit in terms of reading skills or reading interest.
The programs don’t work like we want them
to.
For summer reading programs, the
kids who participate are not necessarily the struggling readers you want to
target and benefit…
However, we cannot rely solely on these studies for guidance
on keeping or eliminating incentivized reading programs. The studies of the commercial programs rarely
tease out the effect of incentivization alone, and these programs have several aspects
that researchers also note negatively impact student reading development and
enjoyment: (a) limiting students to a
prescribed set of evaluated books and (b) poorly constructed, mandatory testing. Many of the studies of these programs note
the incentivized nature of the programs as an aside, including that the researchers
did not know whether the incentives were used with fidelity or at all in the participating
schools and classrooms.
The first factor is addressable and, may, in fact have been
addressed. Given the popularity of programs
like AR, in spite of early studies like the ones I’ve read showing limited
impact on reading skills and enjoyment, many more books are rated and “AR rated”
than in the early years of these programs.
In fact, children will find that most books they want to read are, nowadays,
rated with an AR or Lexile level as well as the concomitant points to be earned
by reading and passing the quiz. In
addition, there is support in the developmental literature, specifically in the
Vygostkyian school of thought, for having students engage in learning within
their zone of proximal development (ZPD) to best promote learning, a theory
that companies like Renaissance have fully embraced and promote. Interest reading – reading choice - is where
it’s at, and you will find that companies who promote these reading programs
place great emphasis on interest reading in training materials for educators and
have vastly increased the number of books available for reading within the
parameters of the program.
The second factor that early studies often address is the
poor design of the assessments (typically brief, online quizzes)
themselves.
Students are not encouraged
to engage in the types of deeper thinking and analysis that we tend to want to
encourage in schools, and the nature of the tests is that they are easily
hacked or cheated upon in order to game the system and get the points.
Regardless, being tested on material is not
typically a positive motivation for student participation in learning, more the
stick than the carrot.
Perhaps the fact that these often-discussed limitations can
be (and have been, to some extent) addressed leads teachers and librarians to
conclude that the issues raised by research on effective reading instruction
and motivation have been addressed. There
is little teasing out in the research, however, of the role of incentivized
reading either inside or outside the context of these commercially designed
programs. While incentivization is a component
of these commercial programs, few researchers look in detail at the specific role
of the incentives themselves. Barbara Marinek
comes the closest and calls for a closer look at the proximity of incentives
and the value of extrinsic motivators for students who are low in intrinsic
motivation. (I’m reading more on this now.)
Furthermore, these studies fail to address the necessary
corollary of all incentivized reading programs:
when students must read a certain number of books or pages or minutes
(either to gain points as in programs like AR or in order to count such books,
pages, or minutes as in other more “grass roots” reading incentive programs),
they must record those books, pages, and minutes. In short, reading is turned
into a chore. One that must be
documented and proven. I posit that it
is this aspect of incentivized reading programs that does the most damage. Reading is not done for the joy of
discovering something new or of escaping into a world where the answers to life’s
problems are all written down on the page or of encountering an idea that makes
you laugh or cry or “go hmmm.” It is
done for task completion, to check off the box, meet the minimum required
standards, and, perhaps, if you are one of the children blessed to take to
reading easily under our current, research-ignoring reading instructional
programs, win a prize. If you don’t win
the prize, why bother??
At this point, I find myself asking two separate questions,
both worthy of thought and research. The
first is one that may have an easily discoverable answer: why do we continue to do these programs? When there is so much research on the failure
of certain commercially developed incentivized programs to provide the outcomes
we desire, why do we continue to do them?
When the research on motivation tells us that the best way to motivate a
human is to cultivate intrinsic rewards, why do we continue to focus on
programs that provide extrinsic rewards (and, often, ones with limited
proximity to the desired behavior of reading like pizza parties and electronic
devices)? I suspect that the answer is
simple: we do these programs because
they are easy to implement, they build temporary excitement and make it look like
we are “doing something,” and there is much inertia at both school and school district
levels to abandon programs into which much money has been sunk. I would be interested in exploring this
further. Maybe if we figure out why
these programs continue to hold such appeal, we can work on making more
effective activities appealing.
The second question, and I think the more critical one, is
what impact these programs are having on our young readers. If we know what good reading instruction looks
like and are, by all accounts, willing to ignore the research on best practices
in that area for coming on four decades, then we are, in my opinion, already behind
the eight ball.*** If we compound this
issue with incentivized reading programs that turn reading into a chore to be
documented and connect reading with rewards that don’t matter a day later, what
attitudes are we creating in readers, most especially our readers who struggle
most? What message do we convey to the 7th
grader struggling to comprehend books written for him and his cohort if we say “sorry,
you don’t get a pizza party because you didn’t read and write down at least 20
hours of reading last month”?? I don’t
think this question is one that has an easily discoverable answer. I think it will require multiple longitudinal
studies over long periods of time to tease out the impact of the many ways we
are failing our students by (not) teaching them to read using methods we know
do not work and then incentivizing their reading in all the wrong ways.
* Check out her most recent piece here,
as well as this piece from 2019 and this one from 2018.
** Carol Dweck is a leading psychologist in the area of
motivation, specifically on how our mindsets affect our learning. You can check out some of her work here. Daniel Pink explains a lot of Dweck’s ideas in a pop psychology format. I really appreciate the work of Barbara Marinak and Allan Wigfield, as well. If you want
academic citations, hit me up, and I’ll share a few.
*** For my non-pool-loving readers: https://grammarist.com/idiom/behind-the-eight-ball/#:~:text=Behind%20the%20eight%20ball%20means,status%20for%20the%20eight%20ball.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1 by Emil Ferris
