ABSTRACT
The objectives of this research are: (1) to know whether Student Teams
Achievement Divisions (STAD) can improve the students’ reading ability and (2)
to know what happens when STAD is implemented in teaching reading in the
classroom. This study used a classroom action research design.
The research was conducted from April until June 2013 consisiting of two
cycles. Each cycle consists of three meetings. Every cycle consists of four steps:
planning the action, implementing the action, observing the action and reflecting
the result of observation. The participants of this research were the students of
class VII C of SMP N 5 Surakarta. There were 32 students which consisted of 14
males and 18 females. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected by the
researcher. The techniques of collecting the data are using qualitative and
quantitative data. The qualitative data consisted of observation, interview,
document, questionnaire, photograph and test. While the quantitative data was the
students’ test score.
Based on all the data collected as the research findings, it can be shown that
STAD could improve the students’ reading ability and the classroom atmosphere
in teaching and learning process. The improvement was shown by the students’
score. They could understand the indicators of reading: stating main idea,
determining the purpose of the text, identifying detail information, guessing
meaning word, and identifying reference. As the result, the students’ mean score
improved: pre-test 57.50 increased to 67.50 in post-test 1, and 80.16 in post-test2.
The improvement of classroom atmosphere was also gained among other things,
they are: students were motivated and interested in learning reading in the class,
the students were paid attention during teaching and learning process and they
tended to be active in the class while work together in teams.