The effect of metacognitive treatment on reading comprehension in Physics text and on conceptual understanding in mechanics
Abstract
This study describes the application and evaluation of metacognitive technique for improving reading comprehension in Physics text and conceptual understanding in mechanics of forty (40) freshmen information technology students at Mapúa Institute of Technology during the 4th Quarter, SY 2002-2003. The metacognitive technique requires students to learn the skill of formulating clear questions. In this technique, they are given text and asked to formulate questions of three types on the text: questions whose answers they understand, questions whose answers they do not understand, and questions related to the text, but whose answers are not found in it. The technique is evaluated by comparing performance on the Mechanics Baseline Test of the experimental group with the performance of a control group before and after the experimental manipulation. The metacognitive treatment using Answer/Question method improved the independent reading comprehension in physics text. The pretest scores of the experimental and control groups are not significantly different from each other. The posttest scores of experimental group in Baseline suggested improvement of conceptual understanding in mechanics.
