Toward a Qualitative Reading Incentive

I had this discussion with my high school students recently.

Every reading incentive we've seen is based on the idea that children should be encouraged to read - a lot. -- e.g., the local elementary school awards prizes based on number of pages, and per book completed; and the local library does something similar.
We haven't seen any incentive programs that seek to direct children toward reading good books, only toward reading lots of books.
In fact, when I look at the lists of what the kids are reading, the worst possible writing seems to predominate.

We agreed that there is a difference between books and good books; and that it's worth encouraging children to choose the latter.

"What do you think?" I asked. "Is it possible to make an incentive program for children to read good books, or is the definition of a good book too subjective?"

Hm.

They suggested that you could give students a list of books to choose from.

Keep thinking about it.

Irlen Syndrome: my investigation

Someone sent me an article about a girl who ordinarily found reading difficult and fatiguing; but when she tried laying transparent colored plastic over the page or screen, she was able to read normally.

Well, that sounded intriguing; so I started looking up more about Irlen Syndrome...
...and what I read made me suspicious.
If this is a real syndrome, why does it have its own diagnosticians? And what is behind the claim that a high percentage of the population (and the vast majority of the prison population) has a reading problem that I never heard of?

There are a lot of articles online, like this one, quoting parents and teachers who say they've seen colored overlays make a big difference.
And there are a lot of articles written from a scientific perspective, like this one or this one, claiming that Irlen Syndrome doesn't exist and the overlays don't work.

So, I asked around: Who has some insight into this?

The responses that I got from people I know paralleled what I found in the articles: I heard from parents and teachers, telling me about students who found the overlays effective ("when she started wearing glasses with yellow lenses, she suddenly went from a D to an A+ average"); or about some who maybe sort of did but they weren't sure; or about a rare light-sensitive student who actually did among many with reading disabilities who didn't; and I heard from an optometrist who said she thinks it's all a very expensive placebo effect; and my friend the nurse sent me another article....

...and then the reading specialist, who happens to know everything about everything, gave a brief answer that explains everything, including the discrepancy between the scientific findings and the anecdotes.

He wrote:

For reading difficulties: if it works, and in most cases it doesn't, it fixes a symptom, not the source of the problem. Multi sensory reading is the answer.
For light sensitivity or vision loss, it can help.

So, that's my answer.

Here are links about multi-sensory reading:
Multi-Sensory Kriah - he didn't send me this link; I am promoting him; and
Multisensory Structured Language Teaching Fact Sheet

As a side note, one thing all the Irlen pro and con studies seem to agree on is that children enjoy experimenting with reading through colored cellophane.
Well, a novel kriyah activity is also something...