Enhancing students’ reading comprehension through self-assessment: A quasi-experimental study in a senior high school

This study investigates the effect of self-assessment on the reading comprehension of narrative texts among grade X students in a senior high school EFL context. The primary objective is to determine whether the application of self-assessment significantly improves students’ reading comprehension skills. Employing a quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test measures, the study involved 42 students selected through simple random sampling from a population of 183 grade X students. Class XD, consisting of 19 students, served as the experimental group receiving self-assessment interventions, while class XC, with 23 students, functioned as the control group using conventional learning methods. Results revealed that the experimental group’s average pre-test score increased markedly from 51.89 to 75.89 post-intervention. In contrast, the control group’s average score showed a marginal increase from 44.87 to 48.08. To further confirm, an independent sample t-test was conducted with the help of SPSS 25 because the data had met the requirements of normality and homogeneity. Based on the comparison of post-test scores between the experimental and control classes, the results of the independent sample t-test showed a significance value (sig. 2-tailed) of 0.000. Since this value is smaller than the significance standard of 0.05, the null hypothesis (H₀) is rejected, and the alternative hypothesis (Hₐ) is accepted, which means that there is a significant improvement in reading ability among students using self-assessment. The findings suggest that self-assessment effectively enhances engagement and understanding of narrative texts, highlighting its value in EFL reading instruction to promote autonomous learning and literacy.