Motivation and Engagement Strategies

 

Student motivation and engagement strategies are key components of effective instruction in a general sense, but especially in reading and literacy instruction. Intrinsic motivation is essential to student success in reading, and students that have difficulty succeeding in reading are often disengaged with traditional print methods of literacy learning. The studies discussed in this blog found that different multimodal teaching tools such as graphic novels, blogs, videos, websites, and other media can be effectively used in combination with traditional paper-based texts to foster motivation and engagement in students that typically struggle with reading and writing.

    One study (Hoch, 2018) sought to gauge benefits and constraints of using digital and multimodal text sets to guide personal inquiry and developed the Five Key Principles frame. The first principle focuses on attending to motivation and engagement, and the reasoning behind why some students fall behind and become disinterested in reading, noting that “struggling readers have often experienced long-term frustration and failure, resulting in a lack of motivation. (Hoch, 2018, p. 704). Students should be presented with a challenging topic to begin a personal inquiry journey, but fostering confidence is also important. The author notes, “Although challenge is motivating, students must believe the task is possible” (Hoch, p. 704). Another study (Darrington, 2015) noted the importance of allowing student choice in order to foster confidence: “If students feel like they are being challenged by a writing task, yet they are still able to achieve that task, they will find the task more motivating” (p.30).

Student choice in their topics of digital inquiry is an important factor to motivate them, but there is pressure on teachers to adhere to a selected curriculum. Teachers consistently seek to strike a balance between student-specific needs and the requirements of principals, schools, and district standards. Incorporating multimodal tools in the classroom has opened up possibilities for teachers to achieve that balance. One study (Krause, 2013) postulated that “traditional conceptualizations of literacy as reliant on print forms of text are outdated and unresponsive to the dynamic changes of the 21st century” (p. 237). Some texts can lack relevance to students’ lives outside of school, and it is therefore sometimes difficult to make personal connections and establish a good relationship with reading. The author of this study used multimodal tools in her classroom such as iMovie, Animoto, Prezi, Xtranormal, and Glogster EDU to encourage collaboration and engage her students in writing projects. She noted, “Often, students report to feel "safe" when collaboratively developing an Xtranormal production because they are not concerned with performance anxiety, which is typically felt during a traditional Reader's Theater” (Krause, p. 242). Another study author (Darrington, 2015) used podcasts in his high school classroom, noting that “Well-designed writing projects that use student-created multimedia and multimodal outputs have the potential to increase struggling students’ motivation to complete writing assignments by making the assignments more relevant to students’ lives and by creating more authentic audiences for students’ writing” (p.29). Another article reviews literature on the use of graphic novels as a multimodal teaching tool for their combination of image and text to tell a story, noting “instruction must include approaches that address the multiple modes of communication used to tell the story in graphic novels” (Brugar, 2017).

A graphic from the Maine Center for Meaningful Engaged Learning website shows six strategies for high-impact teaching and fostering motivation in the classroom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Brugar, K. A., Roberts, K. L., Jiménez, L. M., & Meyer, C. K. (2017). More than Mere motivation: Learning specific content through multimodal narratives. Literacy Research and Instruction, 57(2), 183-208. https://doi.org/10.1080/19388071.2017.1351586

Darrington, Brett, & Dousay, Tonia. (2015). Using Multimodal Writing to Motivate Struggling Students to Write. TechTrends, 59(6), 29-34

Hoch, M. L., McCarty, R., Gurvitz, D., & Sitkoski, I. (2018). Five key principles: Guided inquiry with multimodal text sets. The Reading Teacher, 72(6), 701-710. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1781

Krause, M. B. (2013). A Series of Unfortunate Events. Gifted Child Today, 36(4), 236-245.