This report focused on evaluating the current research and interest in infant study in educational psychology.  In this report, relevant papers presented in The Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology published in 2011 and the proceedings of the 53rd annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology were selected.  Current interests for infant development detected in the Educational Psychology area are mainly focused on cognition, emotion, and motor development.  The nurturing skills of parents and the education tracks of students for kindergarten teachers are also two major associated fields related to infant study.  The importance of a global understanding in these fields is discussed in this paper.

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    The present paper surveyed domestic researches on the development in childhood and adolescence published in the Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology, the Japanese Journal of Psychology, the Japanese Journal of Developmental Psychology, and the Japanese Journal of Personality between July 2010 and June 2011, and The proceedings of the 53th Annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology.  Studies were reviewed in five categories ; self, person perception, interpersonal relationship, adjustment and mental health, and reaction to the emergency.  General trends of current studies and implications for future studies were discussed.

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    The purpose of this paper was to review Japanese developmental psychological studies of adulthood and the elderly from July 2010 to June 2011.  The studies of adulthood (aged 20-65 years) were classified into parenthood, marital relationships, career, and physical changes.  The studies of the elderly (aged over 65 years) were classified as adjustment, grandparenthood, cognition, and care.  The main findings were as follows: there were not many studies with data from multiple developmental stages of both adulthood and the elderly.  In most studies of adulthood, the research question was about parenthood and career development.  Among the studies of the elderly, there were some that investigated narratives of the oldest old (over 85 years) and personality development.  These studies suggested that elderly is a mature stage in lifespan development. In addition, there were a few studies of a major earthquake in Hanshin-Awaji (January, 1995).  The short- and long-term psychological studies and support for adults and the elderly will be expected, in the event of a major earthquake in Eastern Japan (March, 2011).

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    The purpose of this report was to review research on personality in some Japanese psychology fields.  The report focused especially on the relationships between personality and psychological adaptation, as mental health and personal relationships.  Reviewed research was based on questionnaire methods.  Much research reviewed in this report investigated the effects of each trait on psychological adaptation, but not on the comprehensive personality.  The points of temperament based on the biological personality theory, clarifying structure of traits, and distinction of similar traits were regarded as important perspectives.  These perspectives might provide useful suggestions for effective intervention and solve contradictions in previous research that dealt with the effects of traits on psychological adaptation.

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    This article reviewed 245 studies in social psychology among the 570 studies reported at the 53rd annual meeting of the Japanese Educational Psychological Association.  In this fiscal year, the number of studies of school organization and a teacher or a group of teachers had increased.  The interest in themes such as children’s human relationships and classroom adaptation remained high.  This article also reviewed the trends in social psychological studies about human relationship published in Japan over the last year.  The themes of these studies included (1) conformity to deviant behaviors and social comparison in the classroom, (2) intimacy, exclusiveness, and the dilution of adolescent human relationships, (3) the function of intimate relationships on an individual person (e.g., relational efficacy, social motivation), (4) the negative aspects of human relationships (e.g., relational aggression, withdrawal), (5) coping behaviors, affects (e.g., guilt, gratitude, and empathy), and social skills that support human relationships.  It was revealed that recent ambitious studies attempted to comprehend human relationship as an intersubjective concept and understand human interaction processes.

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    The present article reviews the current trends in the studies of teaching and learning from July 2010 to June 2011.  From the viewpoint of teacher activities, this article deals with the following five perspectives: (1) actual states of children or students, (2) motivation, (3) understanding of the direction of educational intervention, (4) development of teaching strategies and materials, and (5) teacher’s actual states or learning.  In conclusion, this article shows two possible directions for further studies on this issue.  First, we need to integrate the various theories and research objects to develop a holistic model that can be applied to educational practice.  Second, we need to develop a framework that enables us to link that model to educational practices or subjects.

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    Following the trend from previous years, many studies were based on the construction of psychological scales.  In contrast, because the field shares the concerns on oversupply and overabundance of psychological scales and measurements, many seminars and research presentations have warned the necessity of validity examination and methodology for it.  In recent years, studies of psychological measurement, educational evaluation, and testing are subdivided into several areas and reported in various academic organizations.  While some studies are conducted on theories of testing, the development of new statistical procedures, and application of IT technology on testing, others investigate practical problems occurring in real-life testing situations.  In the future, these studies may provide new directions to connect academic research and educational practices, which has been a problem to be solved in educational psychology.

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    This paper deals with the clinical psychology theses published from July 2010 through June 2011 and identifies future issues.  The March 2011 earthquake inflicted great psychological wounds on its victims.  First, this paper reviews the research regarding disaster experience, loss experience, and psychological trauma.  Long-term practice and research will now be required to support the victims.  The paper also surveys theses regarding psychotherapy and support for persons suffering from diverse psychiatric symptoms and psychological maladjustments.  Concerning children, there were a number of papers regarding non-attendance at school, bullying, and aggressive behavior, but few concerning child abuse.  Future research is expected in this field.  Younger people are exhibiting symptoms of depression, social anxiety, and apathy.  Early treatment and prevention are needed.  There were many papers regarding the treatment of personality disorders, eating disorders, and other difficult cases among adolescents.  Many written surveys of students addressed anxiety, depression, aggressive behavior, apathy, and social withdrawal.  However, there has been little research in clinical psychology on practice or qualitative analyses on interview surveys, and further development in these areas is expected.

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    The present article reviews research on special needs education in Japan and then explores the trends in research on this topic, focusing especially on issues relating to support for the children with developmental disorder in regular schools.  The following two directions were extracted from the studies.  First, training or intervention programs for children as individuals are emphasized and considerable studies that aimed at behavioral improvement have been published.  Second, it focuses on the condition of relationships in the classroom and seeks the possibility to reconstruct the teacher’s collaborative collegiality and their teaching practices.  For evolving special needs education, the present author looks forward to the creation of innovative studies, in which the researchers’ elicit findings are embedded in the teaching practice in regular schools.

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    From the perspective of school teachers, this paper analyzes research outcomes of school psychology, primarily produced in the past year, and discusses their implications for peer support programs.  Results show that while peer support programs have been used in schools and proven to be quite effective, few practices based on school assessment have been encouraged in these programs.  To help schools better utilize research outcomes of school psychology, effective methods need to be found to link theory with practice.  We expect, therefore, that research will help motivate teachers on the ground, and they will, in turn, serve the advent of new research, which will subsequently benefit them again.  This cyclic relationship between theory and practice needs to be achieved in the field of education.

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    Promoting student learning skills is one of the important goals of school education. However, case studies involving educational practices suggest that students do not develop such skills to a level that would make them autonomous in learning. In addition, studies about school practices in Japan have suggested that efforts at developing student learning skills in schools are not adequate. To address this problem and to contribute to the promotion of student learning skills development, this paper examines relevant research areas including educational practices. It firstly introduces variations in learning skills suggested in the learning strategies research area. Secondly, it summarizes the developmental processes and factors relating to the use of learning strategies. Thirdly, the paper provides an overview of research areas and educational practices that promote the development of learning skills. Finally, it proposes a future direction to address the problem.

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    This article discussed the concept of validity from both historical and psychometric perspectives.  We started by describing the so-called “trinitarian view of validity” in a detailed historical context.  This view presumes that criterion-related validity, construct validity, and content validity constitute the “different types” of validity.  We delineated several problems with this view and introduced the more recent “unitary concept of validity,” in which the construct validity is viewed as the central theme and subsumes all types of validation process.  We next discussed several topics on practical measurement validation from psychometric perspectives.  These topics include 1) incompatibility between broad-band scales and traditional psychometric measurement models, 2) distinctions and relations between within-person and between-person correlations, and 3) the impact of metric arbitrariness on the interpretation of data.

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    “Metacognition” is a vague concept.  It is difficult to examine the metacognitive activities with psychological methods.  But research has pointed out the importance of metacognitive activities or processes in school learning and other learning contexts.  Recently, a number of papers and books were published in the world.  There are two aspects in metacognition—metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive monitoring.  In this article, I reviewed research about the development of metacognitive knowledge in school learning.  Next, I focused on the metacognitive activities in comprehension.  This is called comprehension monitoring.  These processes were included in reading, mathematical, and scientific problem solving.  Finally, the review points out some problems for future metacognitive and instructional research.

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    The aim of this paper is to show how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to enhance the learning of statistics for psychology students.  Many psychology students often have difficulty in understanding statistics.  The ICTs can be of great assistance in learning statistics.  We can make use of mobile devices to make a lecture more interactive.  Smart phones can act as a second monitor to read text that explains a data analysis procedure, while a PC monitor is used to conduct the analysis.  Video-sharing services enable us to broadcast lectures.  Teachers can cooperate to develop a test item database, which can be very useful for finding appropriate items for exercise tasks or examinations.  Computer simulations using Excel are also useful for understanding statistics.

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    This paper explores how to enhance students’ ability to write academic essays, with special emphasis on problem setting.  We propose that problem setting in writing can be divided into three sub processes—problem recognition, problem elaboration, and problem formulation—and that there are possibilities to enhance students’ writings by providing some instructional aids in each process.  We pointed out that in the process of problem recognition, critical reading and intuitive judgments of documents are crucial for students to write better essays, and that facilitating these activities produces better performance in writing.  Next, we showed that in the process of problem elaboration, the externalization of ideas diagrammatically or verbally results in better writing.  Finally, we proposed that to formulate the problem, writers should be explicit to define the problem to be discussed, to describe its significance to the public, and to contrast his/her own solution to the problem with others.  A longitudinal analysis of the development of students’ writings in a collaborative learning environment revealed that students could learn to define and contrast their own problem more easily than they could describe its significance.

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