While educators and researchers agree on the crucial role of literacy motivation for performance, research on methods for accurately assessing adolescent reading motivation is still uncommon. The most used reading motivation instruments do not attend to the multiple content areas in which adolescents read. The present study examines a new content-area sensitive measure of reading motivation. One hundred forty middle school students across content-area classrooms participated. Exploratory factor analysis was used to examine the factor structure of this measure, and associations among existing measures, social aspects of literacy events, and teacher-rated content-area reading performance were explored to examine the validity and utility of this measure for classroom practice. Educational implications include the potential for teachers to adapt instruction based on students’ content-area-specific reading motivations.
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