This a follow-up to my related post, How Young Is Too Young, which I posted yesterday. These posts were provoked by a new program that my sister’s middle school is implementing. To encourage students to read, they are requiring a mandatory reading time during the last 15 minutes of every lunch period. Furthermore, they are punishing students who don’t participate or forget to bring a book by making them sit at the “bad” table with other delinquents.
Now, if the goal of this program is to increase the amount that students read, they might succeed. Sure, each student will reluctantly read 15 minutes of each day – but what quality of reading will this be? Furthermore, these kids are not going to ENJOY reading. If they want this program to have long-term effects, then they need to approach it with the goal of attitude change to encourage enjoyment of reading.
With the current system, here are two scenarios that will happen:
1) Student who initially doesn’t like to read and rarely does:
These students will begin reading 15 minutes in accordance with the policy. However, their motivation for reading is going to be driven by avoiding punishment. Without intrinsic motivation these children will not begin to enjoy reading for the sake of learning or pleasure. Instead, they will justify the effort that reading takes by rationalizing that they were forced to do it. Therefore, when they are no longer being forced to read (at home or later in life), they will make no effort to continue making efforts to read. 
2) Student who DOES initially like to read:
Psychology has a lot to say about this set of students too. Without going into all the details of dissonance theory and attitude change, if you have someone whose attitude is already in the direction you want it to be, if you force them to do the behavior that you want it will NOT increase the behavior. Instead, it will decrease the desired behavior (in this case reading), and will change their attitude to be farther from the desired attitude. In simple terms, kids who like to read are going to read less and begin to dislike reading. They will do this since they will begin to attribute their own efforts to read to the program and force, not free choice, so they will think that they are only reading because they have to – not because they enjoy it.
Overall, this program leads to LESS long-term reading changes and increased negative attitudes. This definitely isn’t what I had hoped our schools were promoting. Looks like they could use a psychologist to help make their programs more effective, huh?
Some years ago I read about a school that set aside 30 minutes every day when the entire school read. They could read anything. Comic books to encyclopedias. Teachers, Principal, Custodians–they each sat down and read at the same time.
I thought that sounded pretty cool. But what you describe sounds too punitive to work.
Exactly. In order for this to work, there needs to be free choice and low reward. So that type of thing would work great. High punishments, or conversely high rewards, don’t work since they give the individual something external to justify motivation with. If they stopped all punishments but gave the kids 5 extra credit points for reading it probably wouldn’t work either since the reward is too high and they would just excuse the behavior as being for the reward.
Sorry for the confusing rambles- this topic really interests me and I could go on for a while with research specifics etc. Thanks for the input though and the specific example! That’s really interesting =)
One thing my sister’s school IS doing right – her English teacher is teaching that course without any required books. They set aside entire class periods to read a few times a week, but the students can read a book of choice. I think this is great.
You’re really getting into a lot of stuff dealing with cognitive dissonance and self justification for this topic (side note, if you haven’t read it, the book ‘Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)’ by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson deals with it in depth) as well as operant conditioning to talk about how to get kids to read.
Ok, Psychology rant over, those who had no idea what I was talking about in the first part can start reading again. Personally my biggest problem with schools dealing with kids reading is that educators always throw the same books at students. I always give the example that my freshman year of high school we read Great Expectations. I was 14 then, and I absolutely hated the book. I didn’t care about any of the historical significance or the quality of the writing. If I were to read the book again now, I’m sure that I would be able to appreciate it more than I did then, but I remember disliking the book to the extent that I have no intention of reading any Dickens.
The ‘classics’ that are often given to students are in many cases not relevant to our daily lives any more, and they definitely aren’t relevant to a young high school student. Personally I would love to see schools make a concerted effort to give students more options for books to read for classes as well as finding books that are more recently written that the students will be able to relate to better. Huck Finn, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, The Grapes of Wrath, these are all ‘classics’ that are often taught in schools (or at least they were some of the books I had to read in school) and now that I’m older if I were to reread them I’m sure I would be able to enjoy the books more. But I’d like to see teachers use books that students are more likely to enjoy, have your class read Ender’s Game, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Howl’s Moving Castle, these are all books that are very well written that are written for kids today, as opposed to schools teaching books that were written for people who lived over 100 years ago (in some cases).
Ok, there’s my rant. I’m done rambling for now.
Yeah I’m a social psychology freak. We had a huge topic on dissonance in my social psych class this semester so it’s fresh on my mind. I’ll definitely look into that book suggestion – thanks!
I think that’s a great point about how more modern, relevant books should be used. Kids tend to check-out when given Shakespeare and Dickens so early on. I understand the schools’ desire to teach classics, but if they used more relevant books first to gain kids’ interest in reading, then they might be able to appreciate the classics later with a greater understanding.
Thanks for the thoughtful post =)