This research is designed to find what characteristics children in Church Sunday School show in understanding Bible stories and how age, gender and class size affect the degree of children's understanding of Bible stories through dividing comprehensio...
This research is designed to find what characteristics children in Church Sunday School show in understanding Bible stories and how age, gender and class size affect the degree of children's understanding of Bible stories through dividing comprehension abilities into sub-categories of structural comprehension, inferential comprehension, evaluation comprehension and vocabulary comprehension.
For this purpose, we arrange following subjects of study.
1. How well do children in Church Sunday School understand Bible stories?
1-1. How well do children understand Bible stories in general? How well do children understand Bible stories in each sub-category?
1-2. How does children's comprehension of Bible stories differ by age and gender?
1-3. What correlation does each sub-category have?
1-4. Does the degree of understanding differ by class size?
This research was conducted in a classroom of 34 children in the kindergarten class of Church Sunday School run by 'B'church in Kyonggi Province. Since this research aims at finding what characteristics children have in understanding Bible stories and how class size affects the degree of understanding, seventeen children were selected from each of two different size groups (one group consists of 30 children and the other consists of 70 children). And, sample groups include boys and girls. The seven-week-long research consists of pre-test, participation in classes and test processes. To test the degree of children's understanding, the researcher employed the Probed Recall Comprehension Test, first developed by Morrow (1985) and used by Rand (1991) as a basic tool and adjusted questionnaires to assess children's understanding, made by Chae, Jong Ok (2001), to make them more suitable for Bible stories. To pre-test the children's degree of understanding, 'The Go-Kart,' a children's book written by Hunt (2000), was used. The book was chosen since children subject to the research were not familiar with the story. To test the degree of children's understanding of Bible stories, 'Bible Stories for Children (2002)' was used since the book has been included in the education program of the Church Sunday School. Among average, standard deviation, one way ANOVA, bivariate correlations and t-test, appropriate tools fit for each subject of study were used to deal with collected data and find the results.
The analysis results showed that children of the Church Sunday School get the highest scores in structural comprehension, which is followed by vocabulary comprehension, inferential comprehension and evaluation comprehension. The gap between structural comprehension and the other three sub-categories is statistically significant. And, the difference between vocabulary comprehension and the other two sub-categories is also statistically significant. However, inferential comprehension and evaluation comprehension do not show a significant gap.
The degree of children's understanding of Bible stories differs significantly by age. However, it does not show significant difference along gender lines. The older the children are, the better they understand Bible stories. The degree of understanding dramatically improves in the following two sub-categories such as inferential comprehension and evaluation comprehension.
In terms of correlation, structural comprehension has higher correlation with evaluation comprehension than with correlation with vocabulary correlation. Inferential comprehension has correlation with all the other sub-categories. And, evaluation correlation has high correlation with inferential correlation and do not show any correlation with other sub-categories.
Next, the degree of children's understanding of Bible stories is not affected by class size. Even though the researcher conducted four tests to evaluate children's understanding of Bible stories, children from the smaller class and those from the larger class do not show any significant difference in combined scores or scores in each sub-category.