Battle of the Gr8’s: A Game-Based Strategy to improve academic writing skills of Grade 8 Learners

This classroom action with the goal of overcoming the students' academic writing challenges by enhancing the students' mechanics, organization, grammar, style, and composition determined the effectiveness of the researcher-made game-based strategy as an intervention on enhancing the academic writing skills of selected Grade 8 students in English at Goldenville School of Montessori Inc. for the school year 2022-2023. To determine the academic writing skills of the participants of the study before the intervention, pre-writing that requires students to compose a narrative essay on a specific topic has been administered. The students identified with difficulties were subjected for the intervention. The researchers held post-writing activities that determined the effectiveness of the game-based strategy in their academic writing performance in English. With a Purposive sampling method as the sampling technique to identify the ideal participants of the data gathering procedure, the researchers found several results after the implementation of the proposed intervention, specifically the significant difference between the scores of the respondents in the pre-writing and post-writing using the five-week intervention plan for Grade 8 students. Further analysis pondered that there was a significant difference in the academic performance between the pre-test and post-test scores of the Grade 8 students in terms of the game-based strategy in improving the academic writing skills of those students. Through the implications, the recommendations: conduct similar studies for Grade to Grade 10, implement this similar intervention to all quarters/grading periods and use differentiated instructional materials to make the game livelier and to catch the attention of the students.