Emanuel Pando Sanjati. 2025. The Effect of Using Word Search Puzzle to Improve Students’ Vocabulary Mastery at SMAN 2 Palopo (supervised by Reski Yusrini Islamiah Y & Andi Mangnguntungi S).
The objective of this research is to examine whether or not the use of Word Search Puzzle is effective in improving students’ vocabulary mastery at SMAN 2 Palopo. This research applied a quantitative method with a quasi-experimental design to investigate whether the use of Word Search Puzzle has a significant effect on students’ vocabulary development, focusing on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The sample was obtained using purposive sampling technique, resulting in two classes with 36 students in each group. The findings of this research indicate that the use of Word Search Puzzle successfully improved students’ vocabulary mastery. This is shown by the increase of students’ mean scores in the experimental class from 54.94 in the pre-test to 83.94 in the post-test, while the control class improved from 53.11 to 79.28. The significance value from the paired sample test and independent sample test was 0.000 < 0.05, which means that there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test results as well as between the experimental and control groups after the treatment. Therefore, the research hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and the null hypothesis (H0) was rejected. It can be concluded that Word Search Puzzle is an effective media for improving students’ vocabulary mastery at the tenth grade of SMAN 2 Palopo.