The Annual Report of Educational Psychology in Japan

The present review includes an overview of studies of teachers' mental health, focusing particularly on stress, and to examine other problems relating to teachers' mental health. Factors affecting stress were categorized into 3 aspects of teachers' uniqueness: vocational specialty, individual characteristics, and special circumstances. It was concluded that, in order to arrive at concrete suggestions for schools that could allow for the complex relationships among the factors, further research was needed examining special limited aspects and the process by which stress responses are caused. An overview of studies conducted by teachers and school managers categorized methods of stress reduction into 2 aspects: improvement of teachers' skills and restructuring of the school organization. Approaches to the reduction of teachers' stress from both the organizational and individual level are important. Studies should be done on the collaboration of communities and institutions connected to schools.

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In this paper, the monograph summaries have been analyzed, which appeared in the Review of Educational Psychology since 1993, concerning the roles of educational psychology for children's education. They were classified by the following three viewpoints; the measure to meet the demands and needs of the times, the contribution to drawing up the curriculums for children's education, and the reference to the relation between psychological studies and early childhood education. As a result, it was found out that the number of the studies is quite small, which would serve as the bases of the planning by the administrative organ or which refer to the drawing up of the curriculum for children's education. Only 36 per cent of the studies refer to the matter. In order to improve this situation, twill be necessary to acquire the attitude and awareness to deepen the interaction between educators and researchers. It may also be said that there is urgent necessity to arrange research materials of early childhood education in order for administrative organs to utilize them in taking measures for children's education.

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Educational psychology can greatly improve educational practice. Using educational psychology to elucidate learning principles is especially useful. Educational psychologists who study practice must not restrict their study to psychological methodology. Rather they should think about the issues onto which they wish to throw light. In the present manuscript, the relation of the study of cooperative learning (CL) to educational practice is introduced. CL was created to enable the pedagogical implementation of essential principles of educational psychology. A wide variety of contributions of CL to school learning are described, in particular the following: a method for making lessons more comprehensible to students, and a model of how teachers could work together to build a curriculum. Educational psychology can help identify principles necessary to improve educational practice, and can also help make teacher practice more scientific and effective.

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There are children who show difficulties in motion functions although they are not backward in intellectual ability or language, and they do not have a disease related to motion functions including important sense disorder or paralysis, etc. This disorder is called Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), which causes troubles in learning and everyday activity of children. It has been the latest that the disorder recognized as the word “clumsy” up to now came to be recognized as an independent disorder among international official classification system.
In this paper, as an influence to DCD learning, we will mention about cooperative motion problems of eyeballs and reading ability and we will introduce research results that it is confirmed that more than half of children with difficulty in reading ability have problems with cooperative motion of an eyeball. In addition, it is reported that the problems with these cooperative motions cause a decline secondly in self recognition or social competence, and we think psychological education support is greatly necessary for each one.

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