Abstrak
The research explores the impact of the Reciprocal Teaching Strategy (RTS) on improving reading comprehension and critical thinking skills among pre-college students in Kec. Ampek Angkek, Indonesia. Reciprocal teaching is a collaborative learning technique focusing on four key strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. The study addresses significant gaps in the reading comprehension abilities and critical thinking skills of Indonesian students, the problems found is the low ability of reading comprehension and students’ struggle to understand even simple story questions highlights a larger problem of disinterest and disengagement with reading. This situation not only affects academic performance but also indicates that Indonesian students are not being given enough opportunities to develop a culture of reading and make them lack in comprehending text and think critically. This research using quasi experimental research with 42 samples. The paired samples t-test results show a mean difference of -16.50 with a standard deviation of 14.06 and a standard error mean of 2.22. The 95% confidence interval for the difference ranges from -20.997 to -12.003, and the t-value is -7.422 with a significance value of 0.000. Since the significance value is less than 0.05, it confirms that the difference between the PreTest and PostTest scores is statistically significant. Quantitatively, the findings confirmed the effectiveness of RTS showing significantly better performance.