What are effective strategies for increasing concentration and motivation when doing seemingly passive activities such as reading journal articles? Background

Unfortunately I am not a specialist in Cognitive Science I am just a regular CS student who has big interest in cognitive science. 

I want to share with you some interesting observation I am sure all of us familiar with it, however I wonder whether there are some researches about this observation.

As a student I have to do some kind of activities all the time it can be reading papers, solving exercises, talking with classmates, thinking about problem in research. The problem is I find all these activities very  different in terms of engagement. 

Let us consider solving exercises. This is an activity with a high level of engagement. When you do this you are very concentrated, I noticed that all my mental force are concentrated on this activity. I don't pay attention what happens around. I do hear and see people. However I don't pay attention to them, and I cannot control this state it happens unintentionally/ I wish I could go in this flow when I want, but I cannot. However I know what to do in order to get into this flow, just calm sit down get some exercises and try to solve it.

On the other hand reading papers has less engagement. I usually I set a goal to every day to read a paper (among all other tasks I plan to do every day) even when I don't need to read (of course there are days when I have to spend all day reading papers). The problem is when reading papers I need really quiet place, I get easily annoyed by talking people around me, the best place I found so far is library, but what really makes me crazy is not only people can shatter your peace but my mind doesn't want to concentrate on reading. I very often found myself daydreaming about something when reading  paper in this case I have to reread few last paragraphs, just because my mind didn't get them. 

(Some thought about academical writings)I thought, what the reason of this problem, maybe we can start to write papers in different way, let say papers without obvious conclusion and result such that to cause you to think about it to derive the conclusion by yourself, maybe the best way to write two version of papers one is open ended and the second with results.

So far, I use the following technique to be concentrated when reading papers, before reading try do something with high engagement, solving exercise, programming a while and them start reading the paper.

Questions


What are effective strategies for increasing concentration and motivation when doing seemingly passive activities such as reading journal articles?
Increasing Concentration

A method that is geared espeacially towards reading scientific texts is SQ3R. SQ3R is short for survey, question, read, recite and review. So instead of "just reading" a text, one is supposed to 


survey it first to grasp the basic outline by reading the abstract, introduction or table of contents
formulate questions as to what it is that one learns from the text


After these two steps you start "really reading" the text, which is the 3R- part of the method. After reading a passage, pause and summarize what you have learned. You can be critical and evaluate the things with respect to a certain criteria (e.g.: how much evidence does the author provide?).

Maybe you don't even have to take this method too literally. You might want to switch the order of the steps a little, or only do some of the things mentioned. Thinking about my way of reading papers, I often do some of the things, but not all of them. But that is of course just my personal experience.

Increasing Motivation

This is maybe the harder part of your question. Goal Setting Theory (Locke &amp; Latham, 2002) might work. According to the theory, setting a specific and challenging goal leads to better performance than a vage and easy goal. In addition, setting a proximal learning goals is recommended, when "the knowledge or skill for attaining a goal is unknown" (Latham &amp; Locke, 2007, p.293). This could be appropriate for a student reading papers, as he is probably not already familiar with the material. Setting a proximal goal also goes well with the notion of reading only a small protion of the text and then summarizing it (the 3R- part from above) as opposed to a more distal goal like: "I want to understand this paper". Using Goal Setting Theory amounts to a form of extrinisc motivation. It does not necessarily get you into a flow. So maybe this is not what you wanted when you asked the question. But after all, having to read a lot of papers as a student is an externally prescribed task. 

References:

Latham, G. P., &amp; Locke, E. A. (2007). New developments in and directions for goal-setting research. European Psychologist, 12(4), 290-300. PDF
Locke, E. A., &amp; Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American psychologist, 57(9), 705. HTML