Increasing Motivation in Students: To Support Reading Comprehension

Abstract

In the field of education, many educators have focused their instruction on motivating students to read. Reading is vital to being successful throughout an individual’s life, and the emphasis reading has in school sets the stage for lifelong learning. The purpose of this study was to determine if increasing motivation in 5th grade students would improve reading comprehension, inferential understanding, and deep thinking. The measurement tool to determine motivation levels was the Motivation to read Profile (MRP) and the measurement tool to assess reading ability was the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI). This study involved the use of a pretest/posttest design to compare data from September of 2018 (before the intervention was administered) to data from May of 2019 (after the intervention was nearly completed). According to my research, most students who showed greater motivation for reading demonstrated the most growth. Research needs to continue to further prove if motivation is truly the reason for their success.