Pitcher et al.: Assessing Adolescents' Motivation to Read

I liked that this article focused on students' interests and the importance of fostering readers that actually enjoy reading, and therefore will continue to read into adulthood.  Rather than just making assumptions about why adolescents are not motivated to read, the authors asked the students what kind of things they wanted to read.  As teachers, we think carefully about every text we give to our students.  We think about content and reading level and grammatical concepts presented... but how often to we think about students' interest.  While it plays a role, it is rarely the main focus.   The difficult part is that we have a curriculum that we have to cover, and sometimes the materials that match are not quite as interesting. I have a little more freedom as an untested subject in that I can take the time to read a fun story even if it isn't the most informational text in the world.  I can understand how English or Math teachers might feel a lot more pressure about completing all the required texts before moving on to the "fun things."