THE EFFECTIVENESS OF RECIPROCAL TEACHING TO ENHANCE STUDENTS' CRITICAL THINKING ON READING NARRATIVE TEXT AT SECOND GRADE OF MA ABU DARRIN BOJONEGORO

Keywords: Reciprocal Teaching, Critical Thinking, Narrative Text.

Reciprocal Teaching is a cooperative learning strategy that aims to
improve reading comprehension through four main steps: summarizing, asking
questions, clarifying, and predicting. This strategy trains students to think
critically while reading by taking turns as teachers in group discussion. This study
chose narrative text as the object of study because in general students only
understand basic elements without being able to analyze more complex aspects in
the story. This shows that conventional learning methods are not fully effective in
developing students' critical thinking skills. Therefore, this study aims to
investigate the effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching in improving students'
critical thinking skills in reading narrative texts.
The researcher used a quantitative approach using a pre-experimental with
a one group pre-test post-test design. The students’ populations are 176 students,
and the samples are 34 students selected through purposive sampling. The
research instrument used is a multiple-choice test designed to measure students'
critical thinking skills before and after the treatment using Reciprocal Teaching.
The data obtained were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test to assess
the significance of the improvement in students' learning outcomes following the
treatment.
The results showed a significant increase in students' critical thinking
skills after the application of Reciprocal Teaching, where the pre-test showed an
average score of 52.94, with the highest score of 75 and the lowest score of 35,
while the post-test showed a significant increase in the average score to 81.91,
with the highest score of 90 and the lowest score of 65. The Wilcoxon Signed�Rank Test results showed a significance value of 0.000 (p < 0.05). It was meant
that Ha was accepted while Ho was rejected. These results show that Reciprocal
Teaching not only improves students' understanding of the text but also
encourages critical thinking. For the next research should use an experimental
design with a control group for stronger evidence of Reciprocal Teaching’s
effectiveness. Other factors like student motivation and engagement should also
be explored. Additionally, studying different text types, such as exposition or
argumentation, can help determine if Reciprocal Teaching improves critical
thinking across various readings.