Love to Read: a co-designed intervention to motivate and engage child readers

This project will develop a new intervention to improve children’s reading motivation.

Evidence suggests that children must be motivated to read and actively engage with reading on a regular basis if they are to reach their full potential as readers. Motivated readers exert more cognitive effort while reading and read more often, which are crucial for developing reading skills. Reading has also been shown to positively influence mental wellbeing. However, only 43% of UK children aged 9 to 11 report reading every day outside of school. There is little existing research-informed guidance for teachers on how to foster reading motivation and prior reading interventions have tended to neglect the issue of motivation, focusing instead on reading comprehension. This project will address both issues by developing an intervention to increase children’s desire to read in collaboration with teachers, interweaving their knowledge and expertise into this university-led research.

The project will consist of three phases. The first phase will comprise a literature review and a series of focus groups with 9- to 11-year-olds, identifying the key principles associated with high levels of motivation and ensuring that the intervention is underpinned by existing theoretical and empirical research. In the second phase, the researchers will work with primary school teachers and literacy experts to co-design a new intervention suitable for delivery to whole classes of children aged 9 to 11, over a period of six weeks. The third phase will pilot the intervention across four schools in England and two in Scotland, involving twelve teachers and 245 children. Teachers will receive online training in delivering the intervention. Demographic data will be collected on participating children, and children will complete four assessments: a standardised reading assessment; a measurement of reading motivation; a measure of the predicted causal mechanisms for motivation; and a measure of the behavioural, cognitive and social aspects of reading engagement. These assessments will be repeated after the intervention and linear mixed effects modelling will be used to test for changes in the outcome measures and moderating influences. The research team will observe a small number of sessions and collect qualitative data via focus groups with children and one-to-one interviews with participating teachers.

The findings from this project will inform UK policy and practice in the area of children’s reading motivation and engagement, to improve children’s reading outcomes. The full intervention, with all accompanying teacher resources, will be freely available on the Love to Read website. The findings will be disseminated in blog posts, articles in professional magazines, social media, practitioner conferences and webinars.