The development of students' learning skills is an important topic in the school curriculum. However, the development of these skills has not been a strong point in the traditional Japanese educational system. To address this problem, a cognitive model based on findings from cognitive psychological studies has been put forward as a useful perspective from which students' learning skills can be improved. The new approach based on the cognitive model is “Cognitive Counseling”, in which counselors well-versed in the cognitive model personally tutor students experiencing difficulties in the cognitive aspects of their studies (e.g., memorizing, problem solving, and motivation). Although this activity is basically the same as personal tutoring, it places a greater emphasis on problems that have not been sufficiently examined in previous psychological studies or in schools, and its objectives include the development of new psychological studies and educational practice aimed at solving the identified problems. This paper focuses on one particular problem that has been identified in cognitive counseling: that of students not using diagrams spontaneously even though they receive sufficient demonstrations of diagrams use in class. The paper examines the possibility that cognitive counseling can be used in stimulating new perspectives for psychological studies and in the development of the school curriculum.
