Educators like to measure things. We regularly measure a student’s reading level, his growth in reading ability, his skills in decoding, fluency and comprehension. From all these assessments we hope to know our students better and improve instruction. The one thing we typically fail to measure is motivation, yet the research indicates that motivation plays a significant role in how well students learn to read and in how much they read (Toste, Didion, Peng, Filderman, & McClelland, 2020).
