Marbles-KLAUDA

- The paper examines the results and methodology of various studies concerning how parents’ support for reading relates to the reading motivations and habits of adolescents.

- Purpose: to present a sketch of the role of parents’ in adolescents’ reading motivation and to encourage future researches.

- Many researches indicate that older children and adolescents have less positive attitudes and motivation for academic and recreational reading than younger children and that they tend to read less frequently.

- The author presents McKenna’s (1994) model of reading attitude acquisition in these words: “McKenna specifies three factors that directly influence one’s reading attitude and several indirect paths through which it may be affected. In turn, the model depicts reading attitude as affecting one’s decision to read or continue reading and this decision as indirectly feeding back to influence one’s reading attitude. Two of the direct factors in the model reflect relatively personal, versus social, influences on one’s reading attitude. One factor is one’s own past reading experiences, which produce ‘immediate impact on attitude without the cognitive mediation of belief change’ (McKenna 1994, p. 35). The other factor is one’s beliefs about the outcomes of reading, such as whether reading will lead to a positive experience, like pleasure or rewards, or a negative experience, like boredom or failure. Both factors predict that with many successful, interesting, and useful text interactions, one’s attitude toward reading should improve over time and, with the converse experiences, that one’s attitude toward reading will worsen over time.” (Klauda, 2009) There is also a third factor that involves one’s beliefs about how much significant others in one’s life value reading.

- Some studies, such as Neuman’s (1986),Greaney and Hegarty’s (1987), and Shapiro and Whitney’s (1997) showed that, in general, parents of avid readers talked about books or encouraged reading. Moreover, they indicated that parents of more frequent readers were more frequent readers themselves and gave more books as gifts.

- Wells (1978) surveyed 250 fifth graders about experiences that motivated or unmotivated them. He identified six factors, five related to parent behaviors and only one related to teacher behaviors. This could mean that parents may contribute in more different ways (although perhaps not in more powerful ways, according to Klauda) to older children’s reading motivation than teachers. Three of the parent factors that Wells recognized were negative behaviors, related to “overstress on reading, punishment, and failure to provide assistance, suggesting that parents need especially to be careful to refrain from doing or saying things which may discourage their children from reading.” (Klauda, 2009)

- Other studies (McKenna 1994; Guthrie and Wigfield 2000) suggest that “frequent interactions with others in reading activities, exposure to positive beliefs and encouragement to read, and others’ provision of physical environments conducive to reading are indeed associated with a more positive orientation about reading and greater reading frequency.” (Klauda, 2009)

- Parents may motivate older children’s reading habits in some different ways than they motivate younger children’s, such as by sharing their own books with them and discussing readings of mutual interest.

Reference: KLAUDA, S. (2009). The role of parents in adolescents’ reading motivation and activity. //Educational Psychology Review, 21//(4), 325–363 <[]> Acessed on 10/04/2011.