Self-Paced Learning Strategies and Reading Comprehension of Grade 9 Students in Cluster 3 Division of Calamba City

One of the most pressing problems of today's teachers is how to guarantee that their students are capable of adjusting and becoming self-sufficient learners who can fully comprehend what they are being taught. This study explains the students’ self-paced learning strategies and how they helped them improve their reading comprehension; the quantitative descriptive correlational method was adopted in two secondary schools of cluster 3 in the DepEd-Calamba City, namely Calamba Bayside Integrated School and Looc Integrated School. There were 300 students to be considered in the study, equally distributed to the two schools where most respondents are in the age bracket of 14-15 and are primarily female. The study results show that the Grade 9 students fully implement self-paced learning strategies in managing the physical environment and effort regulation while implementing goal-setting, help-seeking, and self-study levels. Considering the status of students learning strategies, they were able to obtain a rating of an outstanding level of reading comprehension on fluency, very satisfactory levels of decoding and vocabulary, satisfactory levels of reasoning and background knowledge, and fairly satisfactory levels of sentence construction and cohesion, working memory and attention. As its inferential proof, it is depicted that there is a significant positive relationship between the implementation of the self-paced learning strategies and the level of reading comprehension of the students, which implies that when students can employ well a specific plan that would help them learn independently, it allows them to attain very satisfactory to outstanding levels of reading comprehension.