Running head: STUDENT CHOICE AND ENGAGEMENT

Student Choice and Engagement in the ELA Classroom

Lawrence Donohue

Manhattan College
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Abstract

This essay explores the question of how to get high school students, particularly ninth-graders,

engaged in English literature class. I looked back on my own high school English class

experiences and researched scholarly studies and a ​New York Times​ survey. This lead me to the

idea that giving students an element of choice in their reading materials will help them to become

more engaged in their lessons. From here, I devised a plan to implement the element of choice

into ninth-grade literature instruction by allowing students to choose the books that they will be

working with and learning about.

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Introduction

One problem faced by many students in secondary school is boredom. They simply do

not feel engaged with what they’re learning. As a student of English education, I wondered how I

could teach my future classes in a way that limits my students’ boredom and actually gets them

interested in the lessons. Looking back at my own high school English class experience, I

remember feeling most engaged when I had a choice in the material I was learning. For example,

one of my high school English teachers, Mr. Perillo, once handed out a list of books and told my

classmates and I to each choose one as our “outside reading,” a book we were expected to read

but didn’t discuss at length in class. I remember excitedly looking up the book titles on

Goodreads, searching for a book that I would really be interested in. I chose ​Othello​, and it

became one of my favorite books that I read for class. Even with written assignments, such as

research papers, it was choice that helped me feel more engaged and excited about them.

I’m not alone in my opinion that choice makes school more interesting. In April 2019,

The New York Times​ asked high school and middle school students a question: “Do you like

school?” A number of students responded with ways they felt school would be improved. One

student, Matthew, wrote, “Choices should definitely be made by teachers, but there should be

options for the kids,” and another, Elizza, stated “... if the teachers and board of administration

gave us more choices kids would probably want to come, and possibly even enjoy themselves”

(Learning Network, 2019). Other students wrote about their favorite electives and extracurricular

activities, such as Alex, who stated “The one class I enjoy is debate because I feel like I choose

the topics I am interested in. In other classes, I am so worried that my style won’t get a good
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grade, that I feel forced to do the same thing everyone else does” (Learning Network, 2019).

Alex stressed that freedom and choice are “the two things that [he] need[s] to feel engaged”

(Learning Network, 2019).

One thing that these three statements have in common is the importance students place on

choice. In my action research, I wanted to see if incorporating student choices into instruction

would really help students feel more engaged in the lessons and in the class readings.

Research

In my research for this project, one article I found was “The autonomy-enhancing effects

of choice on cognitive load, motivation and learning with digital media” by Sascha Schneider,

Steve Nebel, Maik Beege, and Günter Daniel Rey (2018). The article is about two studies in

which students (eleventh and twelfth grade students in the first study and eighth, ninth, and tenth

grade students in the second study) were shown informative web pages and then tested on the

information they read (Schneider et al., 2018).

In the first study, the students were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, which

was presented with a feigned choice between two different topics to learn about (as this was a

feigned choice, both choices actually led to the same text), or a control group, which was

presented with only a ​“start” button on their webpage and no choice of topics (Schneider et al.,

2018). In the second study, the students were randomly assigned to one of four groups: 1)

learning-relevant and learning-irrelevant choice, 2) learning-relevant choice only, 3)

learning-irrelevant choice only, and 4) no choice (Schneider et al., 2018). Students with a

learning-relevant choice were asked to choose between two text topics, while students with a

learning-irrelevant choice were asked to choose between two pieces of background music
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(Schneider et al., 2018). In reality, all students read the same learning text and listened to the

same background music (Schneider et al., 2018). In both studies, after the students read the texts,

the conductors of the experiments analyzed their perceived autonomy, motivation, and retention

and transfer results with a questionnaire ​(Schneider et al., 2018). In both studies, Schneider et al.

(2018) found that ​teachers can increase their students’ autonomy, learning, and motivation by

giving them choices, whether the choice is relevant or irrelevant to the material. 

Another article I looked at was “Last Year’s Choice Is This Year’s Voice: Valuing

Democratic Practices in the Classroom through Student-Selected Literature” by Michael D.

Boatright and Amelia Allman (2018). This article details an exploratory case study, in which

researchers first asked a ninth grade class to choose titles of books they would like to read the

following school year, encouraging them to look at Amazon’s Best Sellers in Teen & Young

Adult Books list as well as telling them which canonical books the school already owned

(Boatright & Allman, 2018). The students were also asked to explain why they chose these titles

(Boatright & Allman, 2018). A smaller representative group of students then voted on the titles

(Boatright & Allman, 2018). Throughout the next school year, the students read selected young

adult novels paired with canonical texts, wrote reflections and essays about their responses to

and experiences with the books, and participated in in-class literature circles, which the

researchers observed (Boatright & Allman, 2018). The study specifically looked at students’

engagement with two books, Rick Yancey’s young adult horror novel ​The Monstrumologist a​ nd

William Faulkner’s canonical novel ​As I Lay Dying​, both of which were student-selected

(Boatright & Allman, 2018). The researchers found that students were very engaged in the

readings, had rich reflections and conversations with their classmates about their understandings
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of the novels, and made empathetic connections between the novels and their own lives

(Boatright & Allman, 2018).

The third article I found in my research was “‘What’s the Catch?’: Providing reading

choice in a high school classroom” by researcher Denise N. Morgan and high school teacher

Christopher W. Wagner (2013). In this study, Morgan and Wagner (2013) collaborated to

investigate how offering reading choice in a high school class could affect students’ reading

engagement and determine instructional decisions. Wagner allowed each student in his tenth

grade classes to choose books of their own to read for class for a period of three weeks (Morgan

& Wagner, 2013). The students chose the books based on their personal interests and reading

levels (Morgan & Wagner, 2013). In class, Wagner taught concepts aligned with state standards

in 10-15-minute “minilessons,” during which students would take notes and make connections

between the concepts and their reading (Morgan & Wagner, 2013). After the lessons, the

students would read their books, and Wagner would work with them individually to make these

connections through conversation, instruction on literary elements, and asking questions on how

the books relate to the content of the day’s lesson (Morgan & Wagner, 2013). He used these

conferences also to assess his students’ learning (Morgan & Wagner, 2013). Mogan and Wagner

(2013) found that after incorporating choice, the students became more engaged and motivated to

read, and many of them improved their grades.

Research Plan

In my action research project, I would want to look at how giving students choices affects

their engagement in the lessons and in their reading. The choices I give my students will not be

endless like those in Boatright and Allman’s (2018) and Morgan and Wagner’s (2013) studies,
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but, rather, inspired by Schneider et al.’s (2018) findings that any choice, even those irrelevant to

the learning content, can help increase students’ motivation, I feel that even limited choices

could work.

Firstly, I will present my students with a list of books that I know I can plan lessons

around. Inspired by Boatright and Allman (2018), I will have the students discuss and vote on

titles on the list to choose a book that will be the focus of our lessons. This will be the book that I

teach to them directly, that I focus on in my lessons of literary concepts, and that they will

discuss and connect to the lesson content together as a class.

Inspired by my own experience of choosing “outside reading” books in high school, I

will also have my students choose from another, smaller list of books that will contain both

young adult and canonical titles. These will be the books that the students read at home and have

some time at the end of class to silently read to themselves. Differing from my own high school

experience, I will require that at least 3-4 students choose the same books because the students

that choose the same books will be organized into literature circles, where they will discuss the

books with their classmates.

Classes will begin with the literature circles in which the students will discuss how their

chosen reading relates to last class’s lesson and whatever else they want to discuss. Then, I will

begin the lesson on a new topic, incorporating the in-class reading book. Today’s lesson content

will be what the students look for in their outside reading and what they will discuss together at

the beginning of next class in their literature circles. I will end classes by giving students time to

read their outside reading books.

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Inspired by Morgan and Wagner (2013), while the classes are discussing in their

literature circles, I will walk around the class to guide and confer with each group. This is how I

will be able to assess my students’ learning and engagement. I will also assess this through my

observations of how they react to and engage with the lessons and through reflections, essays,

and other assignments, such as in Boatright and Allman’s study.

I feel that offering my students these choices will help them to be more interested and

feel more engaged in the class, as it will directly relate to the books and topics that they want to

read about.
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References

Boatright, M. D., & Allman, A. (2018). Last Year’s Choice Is This Year’s Voice: Valuing

Democratic Practices in the Classroom through Student-Selected Literature. ​Democracy

and Education, 26​(2), 1-8.

The Learning Network. (2019, April 4). What Students Are Saying About: Making School

Better, Learning a Foreign Language and Balancing Money. ​The New York Times.

Retrieved from ​https://www.nytimes.com/

Morgan, D. N., & Wagner, C. W. (2013). “What’s the Catch?”: Providing reading choice in a

high school classroom. ​Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 56(​ 8), 658-667.

Schneider, S., Nebel, S., Beege, M., & Rey, G. D. (2018). The autonomy-enhancing effects of

choice on cognitive load, motivation and learning with digital media. ​Learning and

Instruction, 58,​ 161-172.