‘I just find it boring’: Findings from an affective adolescent reading intervention

Research suggests that reading engagement and motivation are strong predictors of reading performance. Reading motivation may decline as students approach adolescence, resulting in less time spent with text. To date, there has been no research on how practitioners might directly support students to address affective factors in reading. In this exploratory case study, three disengaged, Year 8 readers received five sessions of an affective intervention aimed at helping them explore and challenge their own ambivalence towards reading. Quantitative and qualitative data from pre‐, post‐ and three‐month follow‐up indicated a range of benefits in relation to reading engagement and motivation, including improved self‐efficacy, increased participation and the usefulness of talking about affective factors in reading. Findings are further examined and implications for practitioners are discussed.     

Perceptions of instructional quality: impact on acceptance and use of an online learning environment

ABSTRACT

Given the growing use of online learning environments in higher education, it is important to further unravel how students’ use is influenced by their perceptions towards these learning environments. This study includes the perceived quality of the instructional design based on the First Principles of Instruction of Merrill and students’ acceptance based on the constructs perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the technology acceptance model (TAM). The aim of this study is twofold: a first aim is to investigate the influence of the perceived instructional quality on students’ acceptance and the second aim is to investigate the impact of students’ acceptance and the perceived instructional quality on the quantity (i.e. course activity) and quality (i.e. course performance) of use. In this study, a Moodle-based online learning environment for learning French as a foreign language was studied. Participants were 161 university students. Structural equation modeling (SEM) indicates that the perceived instructional quality has a significant positive influence on students’ acceptance. Furthermore, students’ perceived instructional quality has a positive influence on the quality, but not on the quantity of use, whereas students’ acceptance of the online learning environment has no impact on the use of the learning environment.