Reading engagement research: issues and challenges

This chapter gives an overview of reading engagement research, drawing on cognitive and socio-cognitive, sociological, ethnographic, historical-and-educational survey, curriculum, pedagogy, and economic research perspectives. This multidisciplinary approach enlightens many issues central to reading engagement, but also many that are central to wider educational research including the social context of learning, the nature of reading instruction in schools, and the extent to which researchers, and the research knowledge they generate, might be able to prevent policy makers opting for narrow, technocratic pedagogies and frameworks for curriculum design and assessment. Adult reading engagement forms the family backdrop for children's reading engagement at home. Researchers have identified three overarching aspects of research definitions of engagement and how they are operationalized in the research literature: behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement.