Problem-based learning in a local church: A grounded theory study of the Korean Sunday school teachers' perception of the effects of problem-based learning in teacher education.

摘要

There is a hunger for effective teacher equipping programs for adult volunteer teachers in the educational ministry of today's churches. In addition, these programs for volunteer teachers need to be well-suited for adult learners and relevant to their real-life situations. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the effects of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in volunteer teacher training programs in a church in South Korea. A grounded theory study was utilized in order to compare Sunday school teachers' perceptions of the impact of traditional Lecture-Based Learning (LBL) and PBL upon their learning process. In Spring 2011, participants of this research participated in a volunteer teacher training program (total 8 weeks) primarily designed using LBL (week 1 through 4) and PBL approaches (week 5 through 8). This study utilized observations by the researcher, open-ended surveys, and interviews to collect data from the Sunday school teachers in a Korean Presbyterian church in Anyang, Korea. The collected data was analyzed through the procedures of a grounded theory study.;Based on the data collected and analyzed in this study, the researcher could make hypotheses that described the participants' perceptions of PBL and their PBL experiences. First, PBL can shift the center of learning from the teachers to the learners in a Korean Sunday school teacher training program. Second, the participants of PBL will yearn to apply the PBL approaches in their own teaching contexts. Third, the unfamiliarity of PBL can be a difficulty to implement for a Korean Sunday school teacher training program in Korea. Fourth, PBL seems to require more time to complete the training sessions compared to the traditional lecture-based pedagogies.