A STUDY ON GENDER-BASED INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND READING STRATEGIES ON READING COMPREHENSION AT UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH MALANG

In general, this study is to reveal the impact of individual differencestoward reading comprehension. For the limitation of the study, the researcherinvolves gender and reading strategies as the exogenous variables (independentvariables) and reading comprehension as the endogenousvariable (dependantvariable).This study is quantitative employing t-test independent sample andregression. The subjects of the study are 152 students at University ofMuhammadiyah Malang. The procedure to collect the data in this study involvedtwo kinds of instruments which were a set of test and a set of questionnaire. Thetest is used to collect the data related to the students reading comprehension.Meanwhile, the questionnaire is distributed to participants in order to find outreading strategy used by the participants. All the data obtained from theparticipants are statistically calculated, analyzed and described by utilizing SPSS16.0.Based on the data analysis, it revealed that the female students performedbetter than their female counterparts as the mean score showed68.1184 and58.9342 respectively. In addition, in terms of reading strategies, 64 students out of152 were high user of reading strategies; their score ranged from 102-105.Furthermore, the vast majority of the students showed either medium orsatisfactory level in reading comprehension, 30.3 per cent and 35.5 per centrespectively. The correlation coefficient between students‟ reading strategies andtheir reading comprehension ability was .58. It means that there a significant orpositive correlation between both of them.Due to several weaknesses found in this study, several recommendationsare made for the future researchers who have interest to conduct similar studies.First, in terms of the sampling, this study involves only 152 participants, furtherstudy needs to involve bigger number of participants, especially by fulfilling therecommended ration of sampling with 20:1 ratio. Using the proposed number ofthe participants may avoid bias to the results of the study. Furthermore, in termsof the sampling techniques, the future researchers are suggested to use randomsampling techniques in order to provide more generalized findings. . Furthermore,future researchers are suggested to consider other factors of individual differencessuch as age, aptitude, motivation, learning styles, or personality to provide moremeaningful interpretation.