The Role of Incentives on Students’ Long-Term and Short-Term Interest in Reading

Abstract

This research study could be seen as beneficially contributing to the subject field as it has offered a potential approach for increasing students’ intrinsic reading motivations which hopefully will increase their reading abilities. This study has clearly identified that employing reading motivations does have an impact on students’ motivations to read more, as they felt like they were attaining something beneficial. However, when there were no motivations in place, students’ motivation deteriorated. Even though this study was small-scale and took place over a three-month period, the findings stress the importance of approaching reading motivations through offering extrinsic motivations (such as a desirable reward), even if the outcome is only short-term. The results indicate that a small number of students were influenced to read with no extrinsic motivations in place, which highlights that there has been some impact on students’ intrinsic motivations to continue reading. Nonetheless, this study has mainly emphasised the short-term effects more so than the long-term effects. However, to reach more conclusive results of long-term effects, a future study in this field would need to be conducted over a longer time period and to be able to assess more thoroughly the long-term effects once the extrinsic motivations have been withdrawn.