This study examined the effects of a Thinking af ter Instruction (TAI) approach that integrates teachers’ direct instruction and students’ discovery learning with metacognitive activities. Fif ty-six 8th-grade students taking a f ive-day science class were assigned to one of three groups: a TAI group or two control groups (CG1 or CG2). TAI students (a) received direct instruction from the teacher on the basic contents, (b) explained in pairs their understanding of what teachers had instructed them, (c) attempted to solve problems that deepened their comprehension of the basic contents, and (d) described what they understood and did not understand. CG1 students were not asked to check their comprehension, but instead engaged for a longer time in the deepening comprehension task. CG2 students tried the basic tasks before receiving direct instruction, but they did not work on comprehension checking and self-evaluation (phases b and d). The results demonstrate that TAI students performed better on post-tests of basic contents and deepening comprehension tasks than the other two groups. They also performed better on a transfer test than CG2 students.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ef fects of continuing to deliver lessons in media literacy, media experience, and teaching experience on media literacy in elementary school teachers. This study conducted a follow-up survey that compared younger teachers and experienced teachers who had taken the training program for improving media literacy in elementary school teachers (Sato et al., 2015; 2016). The results demonstrated that teachers continuing to deliver media literacy education and their media experience af ter the training program af fected their media literacy, and teaching experience af fected the methods and content of the lessons the teachers devised for media literacy education.

During the “Period for Integrated Study” at an elementary school in Japan, children engaged in collaborative learning using a digital pen and “mind-maps.” The children wrote “idea sentences,” which they compared with the ideas of other children. This process of collaborative learning and logical thinking was then improved by having an “expert teacher” provide input from a remote location. University teachers were asked to play this expert role, because of their capacity to think logically. The f indings showed that this form of collaborative learning improved the logicality of children’s expression. In response to an attitude survey, the children reported that the expert had had the greatest inf luence on their idea sentences when they were ref ining them. Moreover, when the authors analyzed the idea sentences, the positive inf luence of the expert teachers was evident in terms of the “concreteness,” “validity,” and “clearness” of their claims. This indicates improvement in the logicality of their expression and suggests the ef fectiveness of the learning support provided by expert teachers. Furthermore, we revealed the ef fectiveness of using mind-maps, which according to the survey of children’s attitudes and teachers’ qualitative evaluation, helped students improve the logicality of expression in their idea sentences.

In this study, Teacher Talk Trainer (T3), a system which supports the practice of language adjustment in classrooms, was developed to examine how lessons taught using T3 can influence the attitudes and language use of Japanese language student teachers (participants). A training course in methodology for Japanese language teachers was offered in universities and included a subject focused on simulated teaching. Students enrolled in the subject were divided into two groups: one that received ordinary lessons using T3 (T3 Group) and one that did not (NT3 Group with complementary lessons). Questionnaires and teacher talk tests were then administered to both groups in order to measure and analyze the students teachers’ attitudes toward language adjustment, their adequacy of assumed speech in the teacher talk test, and the subsequent linguistic changes. According to the questionnaire’s results, the T3 Group demonstrated improved awareness of gestures during teaching. Furthermore, the results of the teacher talk test revealed that the assumed speech of the T3 Group increased in both the adequacy of their language adjustment and the rate of their use of vocabulary and sentence patterns that had already been taught to their target learners.

While f ields related to educational data analytics such as learning analytics are rapidly developing, the importance of institutional research is recognized from the viewpoint of assuring the quality of education and management assistance. To undertake organizational analysis and provide support that is tailored to individuals, the integration of these f ields will become increasingly important. In this study, as a framework for utilizing a method of learning analytics for institutional research and student support, we investigated a method for modeling the transition process of students’ learning states by using Bayesian networks. Its applicability was investigated based on the results of numerical simulations conducted as a part of the study.

The purposes of this study were to develop a “Lecture Attitude Scale,” examine its reliability and validity, and investigate its impact through the “Active Learning (Externalization) Scale” on learning outcomes. A questionnaire survey was administered to 1,854 undergraduate students. The main f inding was that attitudes toward lectures mediated by attitudes toward active learning had a positive ef fect on the development of competencies and the approach to deep learning. This result suggests that attitudes toward lectures can have an impact on learning outcomes, and that it is important to improve the quality of lectures to develop students' competencies and deepen their learning.

Abstract People can attend university lectures for free even in distant places by using MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). However, there is not much research that has empirically evaluated what is learned in academic disciplines at such courses. In this study, we evaluated what is learned in the discipline of history by taking a course on historical science. Results showed that the participants acquired more than 80% of the historical knowledge through the course assignments and about 68% of historical thinking skills through the course assignment. Moreover, we also evaluated historical thinking skills by comparing the pre-results with the post-results. They showed that there was a signif icant increase although the effect size was very small. Based on these results, we discussed how to improve methods by adopting blended learning and employing the mechanism of CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning).

The purpose of this study is to evaluate a program to develop the critical thinking skills, knowledge, and attitudes of undergraduate students. The program we developed comprises of the following steps. Step 1: Seminars using textbooks to inculcate general critical thinking. Step 2: Critical reading exercises using academic articles to transfer textbook knowledge to academic contexts. In both steps, small-group activities were introduced to develop attitudes toward critical thinking. Pre, post, and delay assessments indicated positive changes in the participants, which suggested the effectiveness of this program.

Abstract: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which offer college-level open online courses to the general public, have rapidly expanded in recent years. MOOCs are of ten composed of lecture videos and registrants can communicate with others on its discussion forum. However, some registrants hope to receive instruction from the instructor and learn with others in a face-to-face setting. This study evaluated effects of a f lipped learning design for such registrants with data from a f lipped learning (FL) class that combines a lecture-video-based MOOC with face-to-face learning sessions for group-based practicum. We evaluated effects of the FL design on the completion rate and skill in understanding of historical context adjusting for other effects of registrant backgrounds and online learning behaviors. Results show that FL design had no signif icant effect completion; there were larger effects for video viewing time and the number of days of forum activity with some trends toward a lower completion rate among those who were older and those with no college degree. On the other hand, the FL design had a larger effect on the historical thinking skill than online behaviors, and effects of age and education were limited.

In this study, we used topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation with about 60,000 datasets collected over nine years at a university to analyze the free descriptions obtained through course evaluation questionnaires, which have been considered to be difficult to utilize because of various limitations including their manual classif ication. We labeled the 170 extracted topics according to a series of steps and verif ied the validity of the labels. The results conf irmed that the labels had an adequate level of validity, demonstrating that classif ication via topic modeling is suitable for human senses from a holistic viewpoint. In this analysis, we also linked free descriptions with information on courses and visualized information using cross-tabulation to see the proportion of topics included in each of the courses and characteristics of the topic distribution in each course. This analysis method can be applied in the f ields of institutional research and learning analysis in future studies.