Quipper School and the Reading Comprehension Performance of Grade 11 Students

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to determine the effect that Quipper School Instruction may have on the reading comprehension of 52 purposively selected Grade 11 Senior High School students of Jaro National High School enrolled in the course English for Academic and Professional Purposes (EAPP) for the First Semester, School Year 2017-2018. Employing the quasi-experimental design, the six-week study focused on how technology might usher in the development of the following critical reading skills: differentiating academic from non-academic texts, determining text types through their structure, locating the main idea, critical reading strategies like skimming, scanning, and making inferences, paraphrasing, summarizing and outlining. The instruments utilized to gather data were the validated teacher-made reading comprehension test given both as a pretest and a posttest and the participants’ scores in Quipper School (QS) exercises readily provided by the researcher as part of the enrichment tasks. A pretest was given to the participants to determine their initial reading comprehension performance. The experimental group was taught with the aid of Quipper School used by the researcher as an online platform for delivering enrichment activities while the control group was taught using the conventional instruction – the Lecture Method. At the post-experimentation stage, a posttest was given to the participants in both groups. It was found that the respondents in both groups had almost the same performance in reading comprehension, i.e., they were comparable prior to the interventions. This implies that using the two methods for both groups in teaching reading comprehension could yield comparable performance. In terms of the pretest and posttest of the experimental group, no significant difference was found. This means that regardless of the method (instruction with Quipper School) employed by the teacher, the performances of the students in reading comprehension reflected in their pretest and posttest did not significantly improve. However, a significant difference was noted in the pretest and posttest performance in favor of the control group. This means that the students in the control group taught using conventional instruction have significantly improved their performance in reading comprehension. This likewise implies that conventional instruction as a teaching method may yield a better result in teaching reading comprehension to students. In fact, the control group showed a higher mean gain performance than the experimental group. Generally, no significant difference was noted between the performance gain in reading comprehension made by the experimental group over the performance gain made by the control group. Although both groups gained significantly after the intervention, their reading comprehension performances remained comparable, though the control group achieved a higher gain than the experimental group. This further implies that instruction using Quipper School is as beneficial as conventional instruction in teaching reading comprehension.