THE EFECT OF RQA-COMBINED TPS ON THE BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT STUDENTS’ RETENTION IN GENETICS SUBJECT AT UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH JEMBER

Abstract

The teaching and learning strategies applied in Biology Department at University of Muhammadiyah
Jember are mostly lecturing.. This method, said to be one of the conventional methods , is also
applied in Genetics course. This method has not been proven to be effective in optimizing the
abilities of the students to have good thinking skill as one of the life skills should be acquired yet.
As a proposed solution, a more students-centered approach, constructivists, is offered to invite more
participation of the students during teaching and learning activities. Applying active learning
strategies and constructivist causes students actively involved in learning. Material learned can be
meaningful and retention of students increased. The strategy offered is the Combination of Reading,
Questioning and Answering (RQA) and Think Pair and Share (TPS). The combination of these two
is to train students to read, formulate questions, and provide answers, and discuss with their peers
or groups on the material being taught. The problem of the study is to find out how significant is the
effect of Reading, Questioning and Answering (RQA) and Think Pair and Share (TPS) toward
students’ retention on Genetics course. The research design applied in the study is quasi -experimental design. It is aimed at giving the real description on the effects of students’ retention.
The population of the study are the two classes of fifth (5th) semester students of Biology
Department of the University of Muhammadiyah Jember. One class is treated as the controlled group
which applied think, pair, and share strategy, and another one is of the experiment group which
applied the combination of reading, questioning and answering strategy and think pair and share
strategies. The results of the study show that the average retention of the students of the experiment
group is higher than those of the controlled group. The average corrected score on learning strategies
combined TPS and RQA are 9.6% higher compared to learning the TPS.
Keywords: RQA, TPS, retention