This study examined the effects of intrinsic (personal interest) and extrinsic motivation onquality of text processing and learning behaviors. It also tested the hypothesis of an underminingeffect of reward on personal interest. There was no evidence that offer of a performance-contingent reward affected interest, but some evidence of effects on quality of performance andlearning behaviors. The contingent group formed both stronger verbatim representations (shallowprocessing) and situational representations (deep processing), and reported more rehearsal as alearning strategy. High topic interest participants also formed stronger verbatim and situationalrepresentations. They emphasized elaboration as a learning strategy. Both reward and interestwere significantly correlated with concentration, as well as with reading times. On the OrderedTree Technique (OTT), interest correlated with two measures of organization for the BiologicalConservation text, and similarity to expert for the Medical Anthropology text. OTT showedpromise for evaluation of texts as well as studying text processing.