Copyright©2018 P-ISSN: 1978-8118 E-ISSN: 2460-710X 195 Lingua Cultura, 12(2), May 2018, 195-202 DOI: 10.21512/lc.v12i2.4011 INVESTIGATING THE INFLUENCE OF THINK-PAIR-SHARE APPROACH TOWARD STUDENTS’ READING ACHIEVEMENT Didik Rinan Sumekto English Education Department, Widya Dharma University Jl. Ki Hajar Dewantara, Klaten Utara 57435, Indonesia didikrinan@unwidha.ac.id Received: 27th September 2017/Revised: 04th December 2017/Accepted: 18th December 2017 How to Cite: Sumekto, D. R. (2018). Investigating the influence of think-pair-share approach toward students’ reading achievement. Lingua Cultura, 12(2), 195-202. https://doi.org/10.21512/lc.v12i2.4011 ABSTRACT This research aimed at investigating the influence of think-pair-share approach on the performance of ninth-grade students’ reading achievement. This classroom action research involved 35 public secondary school students in Pandowoharjo, Sleman, Special Region of Yogyakarta. They were selected by purposive sampling method. Data collection used the naturalistic observation technique and narrative reading text in the selected meetings. After a series of reading activity, a twenty-numbers multiple choice test was given to all respondents. Data were analyzed by using mixed analysis; self-reflective spiral model and descriptive statistics. Think-pair-share stimulated students’ participation and performance in reading, in which it increased the functional communication, discussion, decision taking, and conflict reduction in groups learning. The finding also showed that students’ mean of readed performance was 63,85 in the first cycle and increased to 66,00 in the second cycle. These cyclical outputs fulfill the minimal passing grade criteria. This research concludes that applying think-pair-share as a suitably alternative learning approach that helps the students develop their collaborative skills. Keywords: think-pair-share approach, student achievement, reading achievement INTRODUCTION In a regular school agenda, teachers and the headmaster begin their meeting with a reflective talk. The headmistress, in this case, starts with the importance of engaging students in classroom discussions by familiarly advocating the teachers. She has said, “Those who are talking the most are also learning the most” (Goldsmith, 2013). This empirical case is frequently found where teachers mostly dominate talks in front of the class, while students inactively sit down and participate only when they are asked to. In part of understanding that phenomena, students’ interaction can be reasonably well-functioned in harmonizing their day-to-day reading class by being given opportunities to share their knowledge, learn from one another, and practice important social skills either in diversity or inclusive classrooms (Friend & Bursuck, 2009). This conditional learning reflects the critical thinking that triggers the open-mindedness, analytic proneness, systematic tendencies, curiousness, and cognitive maturity (Kaddoura, 2013). When maximizing the small-group activities, a teacher needs to reorganize groups and gives students equal opportunities to learn from and become convenient with others (Conderman, Bresnahan, & Hedin, 2011; Friend & Bursuck, 2009). For instance, in a reading class, a teacher may pose questions in his/her class, either reviewing the previous topic or drilling the current paragraphs whilst they are in structured and stimulating discussions. These activities tend to invite recollection of information, fuller participation, and higher-level thinking (Jones, 2008). Reading comprehension constructs the meaning to work with a deeper understanding of concepts and information presented in a text (Rapp et al., 2007). Any text involves a combination of word recognition skills, links to new information to prior knowledge and application for the appropriate strategies, such as locating the main idea, making connections, questioning, inferring, and predicting (Westwood, 2008). This comprehension process deals with the cognitive and linguistic abilities, such as vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, constructed sentences, paragraphs, and texts (Lems, Miller, & Soro, 2010). Aside from that, it also deals with the recollection of background knowledge, sentence processing, verbal reasoning, working memory (McCardle, Scarbough, & Catts, 2002), word identification, and called decoding (Pressley, 2006). The sources are available through articles, textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and online-based sources (Pang et al., 2003). Hence, to help students achieve their reading skills, 196 LINGUA CULTURA, Vol. 12 No. 2, May 2018, 195-202 a teacher needs to choose an interesting reading topic and method through a selection of good reading materials that introduce interesting ideas, stimulates discussion, excites imaginative responses, and fascinates the lesson (Lems, Miller, & Soro, 2010). A teacher may strategically focus the reading instruction on searching for information through scanning and skimming technique, integrating information, evaluating, criticizing, using information, entertaining reading for general comprehension (Grabe, 2009), and doing a repeated reading (Therrien, Gormley, & Kubina, 2006). On the other hand, Horner and O’Connor (2007) have recommended that the weaker readers regularly practice to reach a stage of understanding reading topics, whilst being independent, self-regulating, and constructing strategies. Those facts reflect students’ reading activity, participation, and performance, in which most students still find difficulties in harmonizing a good pattern of reading habit. However, some experts also believed in student’s barriers when joining the reading class. Several studies have investigated the empirical outputs of why reading weaknesses are still found among students. According to Weekes et al. (2008), the weaker readers are laborious and are slow in identifying words. They commonly seem to find difficulties in connecting ideas after reading a comprehensive passage. Meanwhile, Sencibaugh (2007) has criticized these problems with students’ critical thinking, cognitive interaction, and rigid monitoring upon students’ comprehensiveness to find meanings whilst reading. Another weakness related to the poorly inferred meaning beyond the words written on pages and insufficiency of details (Cragg & Nation, 2006). These frequently causal factors have constituted readers’ limited vocabulary knowledge, lack of fluency and familiarity with the reading topics, the difficulty level of the readability, inadequate use of effective strategies, verbal reasoning, problems with processing information, and problems in recalling information after reading (Westwood, 2008). Furthermore, students may effectively use an imprecise language when communicating with their peers. The student-centered learning is characterized by open- ended tasks and collaborative learning modes that lead to constructivist learning interaction in the classroom, which accommodates both teacher’s and students’ engagements (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002). In relation to the expectation of learning modes and interaction, an approach of think- pair-share that was firstly developed by Frank Lyman at Maryland University in 1981, and it has been implemented in this present study. During the years, this approach has been established as a collaborative discussion strategy (Jones, 2008; Kaddoura, 2013). Think-pair-share approach engages the learners to think silently about the question, pair up, and discuss their possible responses and answers. Later, the pairs share their responses and answers with the other pairs, teams, or the entire groups (Othman & Othman, 2012). This approach does not only mitigate the absentmindedness issue that is caused by teacher’s excessive talks, but it allows students to proceed information, clarify thinking, and negotiate meaning that is focused on the verbal interactions (Anderson & Esquierdo, 2011). Substantially, the solutions are shared within the class to promote individual accountability (Getter & Rowe, 2008; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 2006). Think- pair-share provides three functional types in a sequential order; individual, intra-group, and inter-group (Chen & Chiu, 2016). It accommodates time for the teacher to pose a question, for students to think and sharing in pairs, and for each pair to share back to the whole class (Nwaubani et al., 2016; Pardeshi, 2016). by collaborating with peer. So far, peer’s collaboration indicates the learning contribution processes (Sumekto, 2014). Thus, think-pair-share promotes a variety of responses, including analytic, comparative, inferential, and evaluative reasoning (Street, 2002) and plays a positive role in improving students’ oral communicative skills and enhancing students’ motivation to learn better (Raba, 2017). This positive engagement complies with the think-pair-share experience in which most students believe that it equips them better to solve the extension problems. Think-pair-share drills also help students apply the subject content to real-world situations (Getter & Rowe, 2008). As shown in Table 1, there are three activities in reading class that can be engaged through the think-pair-share approach. For this purpose, each student in a group is given certain information to gain an idea (Brown, 2007) and train the habit of students together with other peers through the information exchanges (Silver, Strong, & Perini, 2007). as well as the collaborative feedback. The feedback may address some reading genres (Sumekto, 2017) to perform reading skills, if the collaborative learning is conditionally facilitated (Sumekto, Saleh, Retmono, & Sofwan, 2015). The activity also stimulates students’ discussions and guides them to contribute their thoughts before responding openly (Street, 2002). When facing group-to-group exchange with one important difference, every learner delivers the idea to the others. Consequently, this practical learning approach accommodates an equal opportunity to all learners to be successful (Cook & Hazelwood, 2002). The previous study has portrayed teacher’s teaching experience in the classroom. Accordingly, the students have found that unattractive reading activities make for a monotonous learning method. The reading activities Table 1 Reading Activities Engaged in Think-Pair-Share Subject Area Think:Individually, students… Pair: As partners, students… Share: As a whole class, students… Reading Identifying one character in a short story or passage. They have a few minutes to write the adjectives, and describe the character. Sharing the adjectives, se- lecting two or three to share with the whole group, plan- ning a rationale for choosing these with references to the text. Reporting the selected adjectives and giving the reasons, reading with voices, and discussing the sections of text that support or con- flict with the adjectives, using all adjectives to write a simple para- graph about the character. (Source: Chen & Chiu, 2016) 197Investigating The Influence .... (Didik Rinan Sumekto) have indicated several problems, such as inappropriate pronunciation, limited vocabulary, and uncomfortable learning environment. The learning’s focus quickly turns monotonous and easily becomes reluctant. Furthermore, teacher’s reading file has also documented that students’ reading achievement is still not well-performed. 20 (51%) ninth-grade students have not met the minimal passing grade. This records that only 15 (49%) students have met the passing grade criteria as determined by 60. Referring to prior students’ reading achievement, they seem to be in an uneasy learning atmosphere to comprehend the reading activities. The objectives of this present research deal with investigating the influence of think-pair-share learning approach through the performance of the ninth-grade students’ reading behavior. Hence, this research strives to answer the following research questions: (1) How does think-pair-share approach influence the ninth-grade students’ reading activity? (2) Does think-pair-share approach increase the ninth-grade students’ reading performance? METHODS This research uses the purposive sample of 35 ninth-grade students with the composition of 20 females and 15 males in an intentionally designated class. This research is set at a lower public secondary school (Sekolah Menengah Pertama Negeri) in Pandowoharjo Sub-district, Sleman District, Special Region of Yogyakarta. The reading material is based on the 2013 curriculum (K-2013). The standard competence has accommodated the social function, text structure, and linguistic features that are written in the narrative text. The topics address fairy-tales and short stories as documented in the teaching syllabus. The reading course is commenced in the first semester of the 2016/2017 academic year. All participants are equally given an opportunity to take part in the reading activities based on genders, a term of study, academic performance to provide maximum insight, and understanding of what they naturally involve in reading class. As part of teaching and learning strategy, think-pair- share is equally designed for all participants. The reading material is delivered within four weeks. The method includes teacher’s introductory explanation and small groups based discussions. During the activity, students with the same group are assigned to a decisive-touch topic. In applying think-pair-share, the teacher firstly poses a question which results in the group members simply and individually pausing to think of their responses. Secondly, the activity turns to pairs, and the members finally share their responses to the question with the peers. After a few minutes of discussion, the teacher gives a signal, such as asking for students to raise their hand, and finally, the class turns its attention back to the teacher (Conderman, Bresnahan, & Hedin, 2011; Goldsmith, 2013; Kaddoura, 2013; Nessel & Graham, 2007; Robertson, 2006). Data collection is set in the naturalistic observation in which the researcher observes the situations, frequencies, patterns, and trends in the reading class. This situation corresponds with the cyclical procedures, continuously refined methods, and interpretations based on cycles’ understandings (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2007) to accommodate the following qualitative descriptions on both cycles. Then, it is followed by 20 multiple-choice tests consisting of four choices (A, B, C, and D). Data analysis uses the conditionally mixed-design analysis of the cyclical spiral of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting (Kemmis & McTaggert, 1992), and the non-parametric statistics that analyze the frequencies, descriptive, and Chi- Square test upon students’ first and second cycle in reading achievements. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS This research presents the data analysis that is employed from its cyclical spiral, namely; planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. First of all, the classroom observation is conducted twice with the time allotment of 2x45 minutes in the first and second week of October 2015. The first session focuses on planning the action. The session is jointly discussed between the English teacher, Mrs. Novarini, and the researcher on deciding the selected reading materials. The discussion focuses on the fairy-tale of Grandma Pakande and the folklore of Bugis people. The second step is the action, in which the reading class is designed with the think-pair-share approach. The material addresses the narrative-based paragraph for which students have worked on collaboratively with their peers. The teacher begins her class with the generic structure issue. It specifies the orientation, events, and re-orientation, and it also explains the narrative text upon the lexico-grammatical context. It emphasizes the use of simple past tense. As a part of comprehending the generic structure and lexico- grammatical context of the narrative text, group members are advised and drilled how to construct the pattern of positive, negative, and interrogative sentences. In the ending session, the teacher asks for students to finalize their sentence construction at home, making the upcoming narrative text to be discussed at the next meeting. The second observation is conducted in the second week of October 6th, 2015. At the beginning session, the teacher reviews and discusses the topic with the students upon the delivered material in the previous meeting, and asks for them to work in groups again. Herein, the research is continued with planning and doing the action. The actions are jointly done with the first cycle reflection session. They continue discussing the fairy- tale of Grandma Pakande and the folklore of Bugis people. The classroom talks begin with the initial discussion on the lesson plan, the standard competence, the achievement criteria indicator, and the narrative text as engaged in reading activities. The students are divided into small groups by a prior notice from the teacher. The group members are randomly selected based on their background academic diversity. Next, the class starts by doing the action. The English teacher commences her reading class at 07:00 a.m. with her students. When stepping into the classroom, the teacher habitually conveys her warm greetings to her students, who then t signs a pre-agenda in the morning activity in this session. All students enthusiastically reply the greetings and welcome their teacher’s attendance for the reading session with a friendly manner. After taking a few seconds for praying, the class begins with an introductory statement on the narrative text’s generic structure at 07:05 a.m. This part relies on the orientation, complication, and resolution. The class has also explained the purpose of dealing with actual or imaginative experience in different ways, both individually and collaboratively. Following that, the teacher allocates different and relevant issues for group discussions. As documented in the 198 LINGUA CULTURA, Vol. 12 No. 2, May 2018, 195-202 teaching syllabus, the discussion focuses on the Indonesian folklore, entitled Grandma Pakande of Soppeng district, South Sulawesi. The teacher recounts in a brief introductory, the story of Grandma Pakande. This Bugis folklore is foretold as an evil fairy who is keen on kidnapping children at night, all within 15 minutes. When the teacher ends her brief explanation, the time shows 07:20 a.m. While following the teacher’s brief story, some students continue to read the text in a silent manner. In the next 20 minutes ahead, come the students’ turn to read and understand the comprehensive content, details of vocabulary meaning, and paragraphs inference implied through the Grandma Pakande text. After allocating 20 minutes to read, the students are immediately reminded by the teacher to stop reading. Meanwhile, the time shows 07:40 a.m., and it is five minutes before the class ends. The teacher asks the students to pay attention regarding the running topic. She re-emphasizes the substantial points written in the Grandma Pakande text by exemplifying the theme, setting, character, and possibly teaching value set by. The class is about to be over, and there are two minutes left, and the teacher offers her students to ask questions and give inquiries, but they seem to be reluctant to do it. Finally, the teacher bid them goodbye and shortly walks out of the class at 07:45 a.m. The next meeting is scheduled for October 8th, 2015. The reading session starts at 08:15 a.m. As it has been fully experienced in the first observation, the teacher and students repeat the session with the Grandma Pakande folklore. First of all, the habitual greeting and praying moments from inside the classroom are still engaged within three minutes. After those moments immediately pass, the teacher directly requires the students to stay within their former groups as they are formatted and read the folklore for 10 minutes. She also reminds the students to work collaboratively applying for the think-pair-share approach. The groups are assigned into four up to six members in each group. After using their 10 minutes to read, the students are given a reading quiz with 20 multiple-choices. They stop reading and start to work on the quiz. The students should completely finish the quiz within 20 minutes. When the time shows 08:48 a.m., the students stop working and have fully prepared to discuss the quiz with their peers. Anyway, the teacher announces to them that they still have another 12 minutes left. Specifically, all group members are given opportunities to set up their ideas freely when understanding and constructing the irregular verb, present, and past tense through the multiple-choice items. The students’ works seem to be conducive, and they showcase an appropriate manner and understanding the roles in the classroom. Most students bring printed dictionary and digital dictionary that are facilitated by their android mobile phones. Both of these learning tools are suggestively allowed to use. Empirically, the students use them to search and identify the sentence patterns and the meaning of difficult words, as well as to construct the point of views. Furthermore, the conducive learning matches Rentoule’s (2016) idea that highlights the reading situation addresses the students to construct the meaning through interactions to text, such as decoding, comprehending, and analyzing through the scanning and skimming evidence. This concept epitomizes the group members, especially when compromising the internal cognitive processes. For example, after reading the passage, the students are able to describe what they are thinking about the particular character’s motives, setting, and plot. Aside from that, the students might also respond to teacher’s questions about the nature of the character, setting, and plot to be part of their brainstorming exploration. By investigating the influence of think-pair-share, the storytelling is accordingly viewed to be one of the important activities in secondary students’ reading class, since those who have difficulties in grasping the meaning, attempt to follow the story through the mimics and gestures. In this part, the students listen to other peers who deliver the story of Grandma Pakande in front of the class. After listening, the students discuss it with their best understanding. The social skills are shared among others in relation to the storytelling of Grandma Pakande. This shows their mutual understanding in collaborative works. After the story-telling session ends, the assessment is fully given to evaluate their think-pair-share approach through the process of telling and performing the story as a part of the discussion. Think-pair- share is well-prepared in order to construct an appropriate learning strategy into its applicability. Empirically, the reading activity is designed in the following steps; a group consisting of four to six students, in which every group member should be silently thinking and doing the quiz individually. Group members then pair and discuss with the peers, and they finally share the discussion topic with the peers. This experiential activity corresponds with Fatimah’s (2015) ideas. Secondly, the paired storytelling technique is well-facilitated. This technique accommodates an interaction among students, teacher, and reading materials to harmonize teacher’s teaching creativity and interaction, as well as to maximize students’ receptive and productive skills, such as proficiency, flexibility, novelty, elaboration, and evaluation. The effects of using think-pair-share are deeply evaluated through students’ contribution analyses during the observation. The issues include the quality of responses, time to think, engagement in collaboration, prediction, imagery, summary, and higher-order thinking skills. For example, “Was Grandma Pakande an evil fairy who is keen on kidnapping children at night?” in reply to the question, “Do you think something would happen tonight?” The students share it in pairs reflectively without thinking most of the time. Replying the question, one of the students, named Sheryl, responds with two answers, “Yes, she was an evil fairy” and “Grandma Pakande would kidnap the children tonight if they play outside the house.” However, other students have additional answers to complete the responses with their logic and elaboration of ideas. Within minutes of this session whilst reading the story of Grandma Pakande, the teacher drills again by asking, “What did the story talk about when it is the sort of children who do not obey to their parents’ advice?” Emmanuel and Rohyati are stuck to share their ideas promptly. In this part of the activity, the teacher lets her students work independently. She gives a chance to her students to be active learners. She stimulates them for the sharing session by asking, “Was she taking the children away for the whole night?” “How did Grandma Pakande prey the children?” To which both students spontaneously reply, “Before preying the children, Grandma Pakande took them away for the whole night, and she prepared to eat them with the boiled water.” Apart from one situation where Emmanuel denies showing his collaboration during the first think-pair-share session, both participants are willing to collaborate and contribute steadily when asked for the second time. However, the initially demonstrated role seems to be a less vocal group. 199Investigating The Influence .... (Didik Rinan Sumekto) As noted, all names used in this study are pseudonyms. The influence of think-pair-share generates a more constructive learning circumstance in which students in the group become enthusiastic to participate concisely, particularly when their peers are inaccurate in telling the points. This learning experience notes students’ achievement as the impact of the applied teaching strategy. According to Bamiro (2015), the result is a sensitive and significantly various among students’ low, medium, and high cognitive entry behavior. The results confirm the positive effects of the strategy on students’ reading. It might engage students’ oral language use, thinking, meta-cognitive awareness, and reading achievement. The adaptability of the think-pair- share approach suits the learning focus among students’ groups. The experts figure out this learning circumstance could be implemented appropriately with students’ academic diversity and believed that teacher’s carefully planned instruction taught the language structure and precise use of words and phrases. It can be worked through both modeling and engaging practices that increase students’ experimentation and continuous growth in reading (Lapp, Fisher, & Frey, 2013). So far, the students have demonstrated a better conceptual understanding, greater persistence, and increased engagement when the collaborative and interactive learning methods are used (Slavich & Zimbardo, 2012). Marzano and Pickering (2005) have pointed out that the think-pair-share might be effectively engaged with the time preparation, and students’ personal interaction could motivate other students with little intrinsic interest in a certain reading topic. Moreover, the teacher might engage the entire class and encourage quiet students to answer questions without standing out among their classmates. It means that the think-pair-share could be flexible and supportive of applying for the small group based discussion with more complex tasks. According to Conderman, Bresnahan, and Hedin (2011), the small groups enable students to interact, share answers, receive feedback, and practice social skills. The small groups, as designed in think-pair-share, allow the group members to move fluidly between their L1 and L2. Occasionally, reorganizing groups provide the learners with opportunities to learn from and to become comfortable with others. On the other hand, the non-parametric statistics analyses indicate students’ reading performance through the multiple-choice tests. The reading test still adapts the story of Grandma Pakande to construct the genuine and consistent learning situation as it used to be investigated in think-pair-share approach. Firstly, the following frequencies and descriptive statistics refer to students’ reading achievements. The respondents who have participated in the reading test have also shown their various achievement categories. It can be seen in Table 2 and Figure 1. The frequencies results of students’ reading achievement in cycle 1 show that 5 students (14,3%) gain 55,00; 11 students (31,4%) gain 60,00; 7 students (20%) gain 65,00; 10 students (28,6%) gain 70,00; and 2 students (5,7%) gain 75,00 in multiple-choices reading tests. Table 2 analyzes the descriptive statistics for the first cycle reading achievement with 35 test takers. The score ranges in between 55,00 and 75,00. The standard deviation is 6,073 which indicates a sizable achievement of students’ variability scores. The statistics for skewness (0,049) and kurtosis (-1,112) are insignificant for 35 test takers in the first cycle enrollment, showing that the data are normally distributed. Meanwhile, the mean of the first cycle score is 63,85 and the highest achievement is identified into moderate category with 51,4%. Figure 1 establishes the influence of the reading achievement which depicts the students’ academic performance. However, the relationship in the line graph does not explain whether this relationship is statistically significant. This figure reasonably records important information about the performance of reading tests as delivered in cycle 1. The results notify that this might increase into a more significant score with a better quality of think-pair-share practices. Table 2 Descriptive Statistics for Students’ Reading Achievement in Cycle 1 N Min. Max. Mean Std. Dev. Skewness Kurtosis Students’ Reading Achievement in Cycle 2 35 55,00 75,00 63,8571 6,07378 0,049 -1,112 Valid N (list wise) 35 Figure 1 Frequency of Students’ Reading Achievement in Cycle 1 200 LINGUA CULTURA, Vol. 12 No. 2, May 2018, 195-202 Next, in this part of the analysis discusses the Chi- Square test for goodness of fit as shown in the result of the first cycle reading achievement. The analysis identifies responses in different categories as it establishes females and males’ Chi-Square test by category. The overall difference between females and males’ Chi-Square tests for the reading achievement are statistically significant, where c² = 8,500 (4, n = 20), p<0,075 for females and c² = 3,333 (4, n = 15), p<0,504 for males. Therefore, a Chi-Square test for goodness of fit shows that there is no significant difference in the proportion of the majority of reading achievements indicated in the current sample (n=35). Furthermore, students’ reading achievement is also documented in cycle 2. The frequencies are classified into seven levels; 6 students (17,1%) gain 55,00; 7 students (20%) gain 60,00; 10 students (28,6%) gain 65,00; 4 students (11,4%) gain 70,00; 4 students (11,4%) gain 75,00; 2 students (5,7%) gain 80,00; and 2 students (5,7%) gain 85,00 in objective reading tests. Table 3 analyzes the descriptive statistics for the second cycle reading achievement with 35 test takers. The score ranges in between 55,00 and 85,00. The standard deviation is 8,557, indicating a measurable achievement of students’ variability in scores. The statistics for skewness (0,641) and kurtosis (-0,263) are inconsiderable for 35 test takers in the second cycle enrollment, showing that the data are normally distributed. Meanwhile, the mean of the second cycle score is 66,00 and the highest achievement is subsequently identified into moderate category with 48,6%. Figure 2 verifies the final achievement of students’ reading achievement which addresses test-takers’ academic background. However, the relationship in the line graph does not explain whether this relationship is statistically significant. This figure reasonably records important information about the performance of reading tests as depicted in cycle 2. The results recommend that this might be worthwhile to receive the result of a more significant score with a better learning quality of think-pair-share approach in the near future. Furthermore, this part of the analysis discusses the Chi-Square test for goodness of fit as shown in the result Table 3 Descriptive Statistics for Students’ Reading Achievement in Cycle 2 N Min. Max. Mean Std. Dev. Skewness Kurtosis Students’ Reading Achievement in Cycle 2 35 55,00 85,00 66,0000 8,55776 0,641 -0,263 Valid N (list wise) 35 Figure 2 Frequency of Students’ Reading Achievement in Cycle 2 of the second cycle reading achievement. The analysis identifies responses in different categories as it establishes females and males’ Chi-Square test by category. The overall difference between females and males’ Chi-Square tests for the reading achievement is statistically significant, where c² = 9,400 (6, n = 20), p<0,15 for females and c² = 2,667 (4, n = 15), p<0,61 for males. Therefore, a Chi-Square test for goodness of fit shows that there is no significant difference in the proportion of the majority of the reading achievements as indicated in the current sample (n=35). CONCLUSIONS This research addresses the implementation, participation, and performance of the ninth-grade students’ reading class as they construct the think-pair- share learning approach in the analytic, comparative, and experiential evaluation. The think-pair-share approach leads a positive engagement, in which most of the group learners have a sense of self-awareness and confidence to solve problems and effective guidance to find the authentic learning circumstances. This approach stimulates the broad-mindedness, propensity, and cognitive maturity among students. When implementing the think-pair-share approach, the group members precede information, clarify their ideas or thinking, and discuss the substance of reading materials within the verbal interaction focus. On the other hand, students’ reading achievement upon 20 multiple-choice tests has not increasingly indicated a satisfactory result. Although the mean is 66,00, the students entirely only meet the minimal passing grade criteria of 60,00. The cyclical results prove that the increase of the ninth-grade students’ reading achievement gains 2,15 digits. Students’ unsatisfactory results upon the reading achievement still correspond with their poor inference of meaning of some vocabulary in text and insufficiency to details of the meaning. These influential aspects constitute students’ reading habits’ readability. Another point of view is in regards to the Chi-Square analysis. Its goodness of fit classifies females and males’ statistically significant results, 201Investigating The Influence .... (Didik Rinan Sumekto) where p<0,075 for females and p<0,504 for males in the first cycle, and p<0,15 for females and p<0,61 for males in the second cycle. It means that there is no significant difference in the proportion of the majority of reading achievements shown by the respondents (n=35). Another research limitation conveys the scope of research setting and the analysis model that corresponds with the sample size determination. 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