CURRICULUM, INSTRUCTION, AND PEDAGOGY article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1536891
PERMA-based PBL teaching model: A case study of mechanical drawing in vocational education
Provisionally accepted
- Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China
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In mainland China, the mental health of vocational high school students has been increasingly recognized as a critical issue by both the government and scholars. Positive education, a branch of positive psychology, has been proven to significantly enhance adolescents' well-being and academic performance. Exploring how to effectively integrate positive education theories or models with traditional teaching methods in vocational classrooms is a promising research direction. To address this, the present study uses the Mechanical Drawing course as a case study, combining the PERMA model with the traditional PBL teaching model to propose an innovative and practical teaching method: the PERMA-based PBL teaching model. The study involved 207 first-year vocational high school students from four parallel classes. Based on their pre-test scores, the students were divided into two parallel groups (A and B) for a crossover experimental design. Quantitative data were collected using the Inventory of Positive Mental Characters among Chinese Middle School Students and a course survey questionnaire. Each group underwent pre-test, mid-test, and post-test assessments, with quantitative analysis conducted via t-tests to evaluate the advantages of the new teaching model compared to traditional teaching methods. The results indicated that the new teaching model significantly outperformed the traditional teaching model in enhancing all dimensions of vocational high school students' positive psychological qualities (p<0.001).Additionally, the new teaching model was superior in improving students' Learning Interest (p<0.001), Learning Motivation (p<0.001), and Learning Attitude (p<0.05). Furthermore, vocational students expressed a stronger preference for the PERMA-based PBL teaching model compared to the traditional teaching model (p<0.001). This study explores a practical pathway for integrating positive psychology theories into classroom settings and provides a reference for future research in this field.
Keywords: PERMA model1, PBL teaching model2, Positive Psychology3, vocational education4, mechanical drawing5
Received: 29 Nov 2024; Accepted: 14 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lu, Guo and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yonghuan Guo, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China
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