ENHANCING SENIOR SECONDARY STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN COMPOSITION WRITING: WHAT CONSTITUTES THE EFFECT OF REFLECTIVE WRITING STRATEGY?

The study explored the effect of reflective writing strategy on senior secondary students’ achievement in composition writing in Mangu Local Government Area, Plateau State. It adopted the quasi-experimental specifically, the pretest, posttest control group design. The population was 926 senior secondary two (SS2) students in the 25 public secondary schools in Mangu LGA in the 2022/2023 session. The sample for the study was 62 SS2 students drawn from two intact classes. One school (A) was assigned the experimental group and was taught using reflective writing strategy, while the other (B) was labelled the control and was taught using discussion method. Two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. Data were gathered by a descriptive writing achievement test (DEWRAT). The reliability of the instrument was done by two experts using the Cronbach alpha method and a reliability coefficient of 0.87 was obtained. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while ANCOVA was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results indicated that the reflective writing strategy enhanced the SS2 students’ achievement in generation of ideas in composition writing. Also, reflective writing strategy improved the senior secondary students’ achievement in organization of ideas in composition writing among others. It was recommended among other things that teachers of composition in the various secondary schools should endeavour to adopt the reflective writing strategy to help students in developing the skill of idea generation in writing compositions or essays.