THE EFFECT OF TEACHING STRATEGIES AND CURIOSITY ON STUDENTS ACHIEVEMENT IN READING COMPREHENSION

The objectives of this study are to know whether: (1) students achievement in reading comprehension taught by KWL is significantly higher than taught by QARs, (2) students achievement in reading comprehension having high curiosity is higher than having low curiosity, (3) there is significant interaction between teaching strategies and curiosity on students achievement in reading comprehension. An experimental research with factorial design 2x2 was used in this study. There were 120 students of science classes from grade XII of 2012/2013 academic year of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbalai as sample of this study. The students were divided into two groups. Each group consists of 60 students. The first group was treated by using KWL strategy and the second group was treated by using QARs strategy. Curiosity of the two groups was measured by giving questionnaire to classify the students having high and low curiosity. Students achievement in reading comprehension was measured by giving 40 questions of explanatory texts taken from State Examination (Ujian Nasional: UN) in form of multiple choice tests. The data were analyzed by applying Two-Way ANOVA. The finding of the data shows that: (1) students achievement in reading comprehension taught by using KWL strategy is higher than those taught by using QARs strategy. The mean of group taught by KWL strategy is 74.1 while the mean of group taught by using QARs strategy is 73.3 with Fobserved= 6.74 > Ftable = 3.92 at level of significance  = 0.05 (2) students achievement in reading comprehension having high curiosity is higher than having low curiosity. The mean of group having high curiosity is 83 while the mean of group having low curiosity is 64.6 with Fobserved= 5.91 > Ftable = 3.92 at level of significance  = 0.05, (3) there is significant interaction between teaching strategies and curiosity on students achievement in reading comprehension with Fobserved= 4.70 > Ftable = 3.92 at level of significance  = 0.05. After Tuckey test was completed, it revealed that students having high curiosity got higher scores if they were taught by using KWL strategy while students having low curiosity got higher scores if they were taught by using QARs strategy.