| Description |
The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to determine the effectiveness of an instructional intervention designed to help high school students learn to regulate their interest when reading uninteresting texts. An intervention was developed utilizing current research on motivation and interest. The intervention included three components: Reminders to help students find initial motivation to read a text, Enjoyment to help students maintain interest over time and across a full text, and Focus to help students maintain cognitive effort over time and across a full text. Each component was tested as a single condition, and all three components were tested as an additional condition. The effectiveness of each component, as well as the whole, was evaluated and compared to an existing instructional approach on measures of effort, interest, and comprehension. Pre- and post-test data was collected to determine the impact of the strategy instruction on students' comprehension, effort, interest, and strategy use. A multivariate repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted; however, no significant differences were found in either the between-group variables of post-test treatment groups or the within-group variable of pre- and post-test scores. Several issues arose that potentially impacted the results of this study-namely, teacher buy-in, fidelity of implementation, measurement factors, and treatment length. Analysis of these findings offers possible directions for future research on interest regulation for adolescent readers. |
