About our project
Co-designing a programme, with children and teachers, to motivate and engage child readers
The Nuffield Love to Read project aims to inspire and sustain a love of reading, by creating a programme which combines relevant theory and research, with children’s ideas, and teachers’ professional and pedagogical knowledge, experience and expertise. The project has four phases:
Phase 1 : Literature review to summarise relevant theory and research and identify research-informed principles to underpin the programme.
Phase 2: Interviews with children (n = 60, 4 schools) to learn about their perspectives and experiences of reading for pleasure in school, their own ideas to promote reading for pleasure, and their thoughts on the six research informed principles that will underpin the programme.
Phase 3 : Co-design the programme (with six primary school teachers), drawing upon teachers’ professional and pedagogical knowledge, experience and expertise to create classroom activities to embed the six principles into practice (also drawing upon Phase 1 and 2 insights).
Phase 4: Evaluate the programme (in a mixed methods study) in six primary schools across the UK, examining acceptability and feasibility of the programme, teachers and children’s perspectives and experiences of it, and any initial changes in reading motivation and engagement resulting from the programme.
This project is funded by Nuffield Foundation and will run from September 2021 – June 2023
Project researchers:
Sarah McGeown (Principal Investigator, University of Edinburgh)
Emily Oxley (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Edinburgh)
Jessie Ricketts (Co-Investigator, Royal Holloway, University of London)
Laura Shapiro (Co-investigator, Aston University)
Project partners:
Christina Clark (Director of Research, National Literacy Trust)
Megan Dixon (Headteacher)
Helen Fairlie (Senior Education Officer, Education Scotland)
Katrina Lucas (Primary school teacher)
Katherine Wilkinson (Head of Research and Evaluation, Scottish Book Trust)
Teacher co-design team:
Katie Juckes
Carol Ann Neil
Chereen Rain
Claire Sleath
Emily Weston
Chris Youles
