Catalyzing Academic Achievement: A Comparative Study on Metacognitive and Explicit Approaches in Teaching Chemistry

This study focused on the effectiveness of the Metacognitive and Explicit Approaches on the improvement of the Grade 9 students’ academic achievement in Chemistry based on their pre-test and post-test scores. The respondents of the study were composed of 80 Grade 9 students with the same level of achievements in science. This study employed the Experimental Research Design, specifically, the Pre-test / Post-test Explicit approach design. With this design, the researcher identified two whole classes of the Grade 9 students for the school year 2014-2015. These classes were randomly selected as to form one (1) experimental group and one (1) explicit approach.  To determine if there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental groups and explicit approach, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Tukey – Kramer Multiple Comparison Test, t – test and Analysis of Covariance of unequal n (ANCOVA) were used. The results showed that the levels of the student’s academic achievement in their pre-test, and post–test scores using the two approaches were “Beginning”. On the other hand, the students' ability in understanding chemistry concepts was underperforming or struggling in learning. Hence, the result of the post-test revealed that students under Metacognitive Approach was extremely significant. Moreover, students performed well in the post-test. Further, the students performed better in the post-test than in the pre-test. Students have gained higher means as compared to those of the Explicit Approach. Hence, the Metacognitive Approach in teaching greatly affected or influenced the students’ academic achievement. Generally, the use of metacognitive approach indicates that students can easily acquire knowledge, skills, and insights and these would also mean that better learning and greater participation can easily take place.