Effects of metacognitive online reading comprehension strategies on comprehension achievement among students in a technical skill institute / Saripah Sinas

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of metacognitive online reading comprehension strategies on students’ online comprehension achievement as they read online text which is often incorporated with hyperlinks or webpages. This is because many students could answer questions when they read text on paper, but they lack understanding when they answer online comprehension tasks. The objectives of this study were to identify the difference in Metacognitive Online Reading Comprehension Strategies (MORCS) used by students before and after treatment intervention, to examine processes that students engage in while using MORCS to read online texts, to determine whether there is any significant improvement in the students’ online comprehension achievement after the intervention and to determine whether there is any relationship between MORCS and the students’ English language comprehension achievement. There were 90 students involved as samples assigned into three groups the Treatment Group, Control Group One, and Control Group Two. At the onset of the study the MORCS questionnaire and pre-test were assigned to all three groups. The treatment group was assigned to intervention sessions where they were taught how to use MORCS apart from attending normal classes. The Control Group One and Control Group Two attended the normal classes. After completing the intervention sessions with the treatment group, a post-test was administered to the three groups. Data were analysed using SPSS software. As supporting data, qualitative data were obtained from think-aloud audio recordings with the 30 students from treatment group. Data were analysed focusing on themes and coding. Finding revealed higher mean scores differences in MORCS used by students for Global Strategy and Problem-Solving Strategy, followed by Predicting Strategy and Support Strategy. T-test result indicated that there was an increase in students’ responses in using MORCS after the intervention. Findings also showed that teaching MORCS to the students from treatment group helped them to utilise strategies such as self-asking, monitoring, and predicting. It was found that the students repeatedly used Support Strategies such as clicking on keywords, scrolling up and down on the text, e-dictionary for words meaning, rereading, use google translation for words or phrases and picture, visual aid, or sound to understand the online text. Results showed that there was improvement in online comprehension achievement for students from treatment group compared to students from Control Group One and Control Group Two. The Pearson correlation analysis indicated that there was a weak correlation between MORCS and students’ English online comprehension achievement.