Earlier this week, this tweet grabbed my attention:

Admittedly, it’s from an older study, and there was some skepticism on Twitter about it (you can access the study itself here).

But it does make sense – especially based on all my work on student motivation. On would think that combining specific strategies designed to promote intrinsic motivation to read with reading strategies would result in better reading comprehension than reading strategies alone.

I found another study done by the same authors in 2014 – ten years later than the first one.

It had similar results.

Basically, combining motivational strategies such student choice in reading, thematic units, collaborative activities, and helping students feel that the reading was relevant to their lives with reading strategy instruction (one a week for a few weeks, and then incorporating them all regularly), ended up being more effective for student comprehension than reading strategy instruction alone or “traditional Instruction that consisted of an extensive amount of text interaction with a variety of basal materials and trade books.”

I’m no education researcher and, though I can see some potential issues with the studies, overall it seems to provide at least some more evidence that we teachers need to spend as much time in developing strategies to encourage intrinsic motivation as we do covering the standards….