The study aims to compare the effectiveness of the Jigsaw technique and Conventional technique in improving the students' reading comprehension ability on the descriptive text material of year VII. This research was quasi experiment conducted at State Junior High School 2 Purwokerto in the second semester of the academic year of 2017/2018. The Jigsaw and Conventional techniques were the independent variables, while students' reading comprehension ability was the dependent variable. The Jigsaw and Conventional classes consisted of 34, and 33 students respectively. The data collection used a test which had been tested theoretically and empirically by related experts. After the data were collected, the hypothesis testing used the t-test. The result of the hypothesis testing shows that the Jigsaw and Conventional techniques can improve students' reading comprehension ability. The Jigsaw technique proves to be more effective technique than Conventional technique. This can be seen from: (1) the post-test score, (2)the result of the t-test, which shows that the Jigsaw and Conventional classes show differences, (3) the Jigsaw class gets the higher average post-test score than Conventional class. Therefore, it can be concluded that the Jigsaw technique can be a good technique to improve students' reading comprehension ability in descriptive texts.