Modeling the relationships among reading instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement for adolescents

Guthrie, John T., Klauda, Susan Lutz, & Ho, Amy N. (2013). Modeling the relationships among reading instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement for adolescents. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(1), 9-26.


John Guthrie’s research on engagement and its relationship to reading comprehension really excited me when I first discovered it about ten years ago. In those earlier articles, he and co-researcher Allan Wigfield presented compelling findings that showed that if low-income children reported that they engaged in reading outside of school, the amount of time they reported spending in reading was positively related to their reading comprehension test scores. Even more compelling, they claimed that the data showed that low-income children who said they read a lot outside of school outperformed higher-income children who did not report as much time spent reading. The idea that engagement in reading when one is not required to do so (which suggests strong motivation, engagement in reading, and enjoyment of reading) could actually “trump” a strong predictor like socioeconomic status made my heart beat a little faster and gave me hope for what I might accomplish as a literacy educator. I know that other educators had the same reaction, because during the same year that I discovered Guthrie and Wigfield’s work, I sat in a huge, completely packed ballroom at a national conference where Guthrie was speaking. Thus, it was not surprising that I was immediately drawn to the article I reference here, which updates that research and looks at it in some new ways. This journal only arrived in my mailbox about a week ago, but I was eager to see what these researchers had to add to their work.

First and foremost, engagement really seems to be the key to the success of any teaching-learning endeavor, not just literacy instruction. Here, Guthrie et al compared the motivation to read and engagement of two groups of middle school learners. One group (N = 854) experienced Guthrie and Wigfield’s own model of literacy instruction, called Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI), a model designed to enhance engagement (a little more on that a bit later in this annotation). A smaller “control” (I use quotes because this was not really an experimental study) group (N = 305) experienced a more “traditional” or “business as usual” type of middle school reading/language arts instruction. With both groups of learners, the researchers looked at various kinds of motivation, some of which were related to positive outcomes (i.e., higher test scores) and some of which were related to negative outcomes. They also looked at reading engagement factors that were both positively and negatively related to reading comprehension outcomes.

The reader might wonder, what really is the difference between reading motivation and reading engagement? Guthrie et al treat these as two different things; they may influence each other, but they are separate constructs here, and in this article it seems that a lot of care was taken to differentiate the two. The way I understood it, reading motivation is about beliefs learners express about their reading, about their ability to succeed as readers, and about how they perceive the value of reading. Reading engagement is about reading behaviors learners demonstrate and report, that is, whether they engage in reading a lot or whether they tend to avoid reading. Of course, motivation can be expected to affect engagement, and we certainly might expect that students who are highly motivated to read and feel good about reading and themselves as readers would engage in reading more, and those who do not have those feelings and beliefs might be expected to avoid reading. However, as the research here seems to show, those relationships can be complex, and do not always look the way we might expect.

In summary, Guthrie looked at two factors, the type of reading/language arts instruction provided, and the scores of students on surveys of various kinds of motivational factors. They then looked at two kinds of outcomes, namely, the students’ performance on a researcher-created reading comprehension test, and a survey where students self-reported their level of reading engagement (or non-engagement for those who avoided reading). The article gets into deep water when it describes the various models the researchers employed to map the relationships among the variables. I almost always struggle to wrap my mind around these kinds of structural models and the path analyses within them. Although I clearly saw the power of engagement (or avoidance), and the influence of certain kinds of motivational factors, and how they might either promote or hinder students’ reading comprehension, I struggled with the notion of motivation and engagement acting as separate influencing variables in the context of one kind of instruction (CORI) and those same variables interacting with each other in the context of another kind of instruction (“traditional” reading/language arts instruction). I am not sure why it is important that the two variables seem to act independently with CORI and that motivation only acts “through” engagement in traditional instruction. Perhaps I need to study the processes involved in these kinds of data analyses so that I might better understand what this article seemed to be working very hard to tell me.
In spite of my struggles with making sense of the data analyses in this article, I still was glad to see a continuation of Guthrie and Wigfield’s research line. It is abundantly clear how important engagement is; without it, we do not have full comprehension. Without engagement it is impossible to attain the “aesthetic stance” that Louise Rosenblatt described in her transactional theory of reading, in which the reader really gets “into” a text and constructs unique meanings. With informational texts such as those used in the study described here, it can be difficult for students to achieve such a stance. If learners are motivated enough, we can maybe help them achieve the “efferent” kind of reading that enables them to glean lower-level information, but engagement is required for “aesthetic” reading that takes learners to the higher levels of understanding we want them to reach. Connecting the work here to the two stances Rosenblatt wrote about helped me make at least some sense from the analyses the authors present in this article.

Finally, we can learn from the CORI model itself. Whether or not we choose to implement the entire model as prescribed by Guthrie and Wigfield, looking at the kinds of things they do with learners in CORI can help us design more engaging content area reading instruction that can perhaps lead to better motivation, engagement, and reading achievement. The six basic elements of CORI, which are Enabling Success, Providing Choice, Fostering Collaboration, Emphasizing Importance, Affording Relevance, and Thematic Units (pp. `14-15), seem to me like elements that would go far toward increasing learner engagement, whether those elements are implemented as a full-blown CORI model or integrated within other types of instruction. These elements seem to be logical first steps toward helping learners achieve higher levels of comprehension. The authors here are attempting to go beyond what seems logical and sensible and present empirical evidence to support their claims. Though this article did not stir me as the earlier work in this research line did, I appreciate it as a continuation and substantiation of that work.