The Annual Report of Educational Psychology in Japan

The senior author,in cooperation with researchers in several countries,published a book titled,“Creativity Education in the World”(2005;in Japanese). The present article,based on the material ir that book,briefly summarizes creativity education in China,Taiwan, Japan,the United States,the United Kingdom,Germany, and Finland, and presents several propositions and tasks concerning future creativity education in Japan.In the developed countries except for Japan,creativity is actively being introduced into academic programs. In contrast,Japan is attempting to introduce in elementary middle,and high schools curricula that foster a “zest for living,”a concept that has various meanings but is not the same concept of creativity that has had a long history of scientific research and practice This difference is one of the factors causing confusion in present-day education in Japan.In order tc have a precise evaluation of the results of an educational practice,it is necessary to execute it based or an academically established concept,such as creativity.

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Service-learning is a form of experiential learning that combines classroom learning and community service.Prior research has indicated that undergraduate psychology education can benefit from service-learning programs. However,we could find no published literature reporting examples of service-learning practice in psychology education in Japan. The present article describes a service-learning program at Shizuoka University,which was designed for juniors majoring in educational psychology.In this program, each student serves as a teaching assistant in a public elementary school, takes a seminar which includes engaging in a “reflection activity, ” and conducts school-based research. Through formative assessments,this program has gradually been improved.In its present form,many of the elementary school teachers and students participating in the program have evaluated it favorably. I discuss 2 major issues that should be dealt with when starting a service-learning program: how to develop campus coordination and community partnership,and how to incorporate the service-learning program into the psychology curriculum.

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In Japan. students studying to be teachers do student teaching for only 4 weeks in their senior year. University staff seldom go to the schools where the students are teaching, so that student teachers are trained mainly by school teachers. Mentoring by these teachers is supposed to play a critical role in teacher training. Participants in the present study were 3 student teachers and 3 mentors who were experienced kindergarten teachers. Data collected were:(1) the student teachers' journals and comments on them by the mentors,(2) a weekly survey on the student teachers' relations with their mentors, completed by the students, and (3) transcriptions of audio recordings of conversations among the mentors and student teachers. The results were as follows:(1) the student teachers and their mentors had an apprenticeship relationship,(2) mentoring did not always facilitate the development of a vocational identity as a teacher,(3) face-to-face communication was more effective in supporting reflective teaching than contact through a mailing list, and (4) communication via the mailing list was limited between each pair. These results suggest strongly that mentoring does not always play a critical role for student teachers.

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The present article reviews historical characteristics of cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology, and then reviews cross-cultural psychology parenting research on gender-roles in parenting and parenting style. The present article then introduces 2 approaches for overcoming the cultural dichotomy that began being debated in the 1990s. The first approach, based on research up to that point comparing and contrasting parenting in the West and Asia, is to carry out a comparison of adjacent regions as found in Asian regional research. The other approach is to not concentrate solely on the differences between nations, but to take into account socioeconomic factors within nations. Three future issues are suggested for cross-cultural psychology:(1) research on how best to guarantee equivalence of measurement when evaluating a culture,(2) an examination of not only the effect on individual development of changes in macro factors such as socioeconomic status, work patterns, educational patterns, childcare, and education platforms, but also, from a socio-historical viewpoint, of the type of changes in group and social affiliation that are brought about by changes in an individual's parenting, and (3) research on the relation between macro and micro factors. Longitudinal studies are required of the development of children who move across cultures and child-parent relations in intercultural, multilingual families, in order to clarify the relation the macro factors and micro factors, such as behavior, that children learn from their parents, and whether these factors have any life-long effects on the development of an individual's parenting. By focusing on the above issues, future cross-cultural psychology research can move beyond simply clarifying the similarities and differences between cultures, and in addition contribute to clarification of how values development processes are different for parents and their children who move between different cultures and children who live in multiple cultures.

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