Abstract
In evry educatin covering some industial manufactured product or other, it may be considered to carry high significance for learners in acquiring the necessary technological concept not just to know the methods of techical operatin as the means of actual labor, but to understand the structure of such means of labor and the characteristics of such technology, including the processes of its historical development. My presents study has aimed at two targets----1) Insertion of a manual type of production work between the learners' observations of a given manufactured product and their analogy (inference) as to the necessary production machinery(as originally scheduled in the classroom teaching carriculum)and letting the learners themselves analyze the production processes of such manual labor, and thereby finding out whether such insertion of manual work will effectively help the learners build the necessarytechnological concept; 2) Clarification of how effective the final evaluation of the results of such a practical production work program will be on the whole learning achievements of the learners; and also, how different such effectiveness will be among individual learners. In my field trials to back up this study, I held a production skill practice lesson involving the operation of metal-working lathes for a group of 150 students in the technology course of a Japanese secondary school ----indentified here as only as "school W" between October and November 1992, and then, again, held a similar lesson involving the operatin of weaving machines for the same group of students between May and July 1993. Then, I questioned all those students (that is, trainees) by circulating a questionnaire mailed to their respective homes on how they themselves evaluate the resulting improvements in my teachings, specifically, "increasing the understandability of the teachings I gave," and "how the flow of the teachings I gave was changed for the better." The students (trainees) answered by their free, written statements in five stages of measurements of degrees in the answer column of the queationnaire sheet they mailed back to me. I carried out the whole trails on the entire student/trainees by six rounds of regular technical arts achivement test given all of them while they were in the second and the third year grades oftheir 3-year junior high school. Then, accoding to my evaluations (ratings) of their achievements in the practical work lessons, I divided the students into three groups---"the highest-performing" "the medium-performing", and "the lowest-performing" groups. As the result of these whole processes, I have confirmed that: 1) The practical job lesson program has doubtless worked well in ensuring that the students' analogies (inferences) of the necessary production machinery from the basic classroom teachings will progress smoothly without difficulty; 2) The lower the students' basic clessroom learning achievements, the poorer were their analogies(inferences), as referred to above, and such manual labor type practical lessons were unmistakably effective in providing such students with some good clues to building their analogies (inferences), and 3) The practical lesson program certainly makes it possible for the students to secure an outlook on their potential capacities for planning, designing, and building any given industrial production machine. Based on such confirmations, I have arrived at a conclusion that such a practical lesson program clearly plays an effective role inhelping build a technological concept in the mind of any learner.
