Motivation & Engagement
Keeping kids interested and motivated to read can be a challenge. Some students who can read would rather do other things instead, while those who struggle with reading often don't enjoy it. Find out what you can do to motivate kids to read every day.
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How Can Instruction Help Adolescent Students with Motivation?
Teachers have an important role to play in influencing and supporting students' motivation for learning. This article highlights four classroom strategies that educators can use to engage students with texts.
Student Motivation and Engagement in Literacy Learning
Teachers can help students build confidence in their ability to comprehend content-area texts, by providing a supportive environment and offering information on how reading strategies can be modified to fit various tasks. Teachers should also make literacy experiences more relevant to students' interests, everyday life, or important current events.
Stuck in the Middle: Strategies to Engage Middle-Level Learners
Learn about three strategies that can help create a meaningful curriculum to engage middle-level learners. The strategies draw from effective classroom practices across grade levels, as well as from research about the social, emotional, and physical development of middle-level learners.
If the teens in your life love movies, check out this list of read-alikes for 2008 blockbusters like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
What Are the Key Elements of Student Engagement?
As part of their series to help schools understand the federal No Child Left Behind Law, Learning Point Associates describes the four key elements of student engagement — student confidence, teacher involvement, relevant texts, and choice among texts and assigments.
Using Student Engagement to Improve Adolescent Literacy
For struggling adolescent readers, creating student interest is as vital as teaching language skills.
For Teens, Phonics Isn't Enough
Schools often struggle to find appropriate materials and approaches to support adolescent literacy. Strategies that work for children can ignore teens' existing skills, knowledge, and life experience, and exclude them from the critical content that their peers are studying. Here are some effective teaching strategies for struggling older students.
Poor Children's Fourth-Grade Slump
Teachers have often reported a fourth-grade slump in literacy development, particularly for low-income children, at the critical transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." This study uses Chall's stages of reading development to take a closer look.
