The Study Buddy Approach: Improving Metacognition Awareness and Conceptual Understanding of Grade 11 Students in Earth And Life Science

Abstract

Based on the result of achievement rate SY 2018-2019 38 out of 998 students failed in Grade 11. Hence, in an attempt to enhance students’ interests in science lessons, this study used the study buddy support scheme as an intervention strategy to address the identified needs of ABM A students concerning their science academic skills. This is a pioneering study in the Senior High School of Tanza National Trade School. Purposive sampling selection was used wherein fast learners and average learners worked as a team. To determine the metacognition awareness mean and percentage were used and the conceptual understanding was measured using paired sample t-test from pre-test and post-test results, while Pearson r was used to determine the significant relationship between the metacognitive awareness and the conceptual understanding. Analysis of the study using the statistical tools focused only on whether the study buddy approach can improve the metacognitive understanding and conceptual understanding in Earth and Life Science. The result showed that there is an increase in the level of metacognitive awareness (declarative, procedural, conditional and planning) from 66.85% to 75.50%. In the level of conceptual understanding, there is a significant difference between the pretest and post-test results. However, there is no significant relationship between metacognitive awareness and conceptual understanding. The study buddy approach increased the metacognitive awareness and conceptual understanding of ABM A students. Identifying the metacognitive awareness is an important part of helping learners become more effective and, importantly, according to Hammed and Sabna (2016) developing metacognitive awareness, learners will become more autonomous. Jayaprabha and Kanmani (2013) noted that cooperative learning could be adopted regularly in the classroom to enhance metacognitive awareness of higher secondary students. This study agrees with several works where peer tutoring has been used across academic subjects, were found to result in improvement in academic achievement for a diversity of learners within a wide range of content areas (Addedeji, 2013; Ndirika & Ubani, 2017, Ullah et al., 2018). Coutinho (2007) mentioned that metacognition is related to academic success and students with good metacognition have good GPAs. Studies have shown that metacognition and intelligence were associated.