The purpose of this study was to examine junior high school students’ learner motivation and achievement affected by the classroom environment they belonged to. 341 junior-high students’ data had been collected for 3 years was statistically analyzed. The researcher made 2 groups of students according to their classroom environments: the “good” classroom group consisted of students who belonged to well-managed classrooms during grade 7 and 8, and the “no-good” group had the remaining students. Next, the researcher compared the data of these 2 groups at the time of June of their third year (grade 9) regarding the students’ learner motivation scores and achievement test deviation scores. The t-test results showed that the “good” group scored significantly higher in terms of learner motivation and achievement as well.

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The purpose of this study was to create a self-evaluation scale for teachers in need of inclusive classroom perspectives, and to clarify teaching behavior suitable for inclusive education. Interview results about teaching behaviors were analyzed into question items of the scale, which was given to elementary school classroom teachers (N=528). Factor analysis of 520 teachers’ data provided a valid and reliable scale with 3 factors, total 12 items. The 3 factors revealed 3 types of inclusive teaching behaviors, namely, general support, bridging support and individual support; development of those behaviors had relations with teacher experience and degree of intellectual understanding of classroom management.

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This study aims to clarify what academic-minded high school students think and practice over time while participating in collaborative learning. The researcher implemented semi-structured interviews to 30 high school students and analyzed the interview data using modified GTA. The results indicated that each collaborative learning of the participants was a formality at first, but some cases developed into deeper learning through mutually beneficial interactions and learner attitude. On the other hand, others stayed the same phase of formality due to the students' solo-learning, others-dependent or sociable orientations. For collaborative learning the quality of inter-member relationship was crucial: group members tended to feel passive and reluctant to collaborate when their discussions went wrong.

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The purpose of this study was to create a scale to measure proactive learner attitude, called Proactive Learner Attitude Scale. Constructive concepts of the scale were proactive orientation, learning strategy, cooperative orientation, all taken from MEXT (2019) and OECD (2018). The target group was 801 junior-high students from 6 public schools (M=384, F=417). The results of the factor analysis showed that there are 3 factors as hypothesized: proactive orientation, learning strategy, cooperative orientation, with each alpha factor higher than .85. Moreover, the author examined construct validity of the subscales through correlation analysis with school life motivation (Kawamura, 1999), caring skill and social skill (Kawamura, 2001). As a result, all the 3 had positive correlation with the 3 subscales. Thus, it was proved that Proactive Learner Attitude Scale is reliable and valid for junior-high students.

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This study examined reliability and validity of Classroom-Based School Life Orientation Scale. The scale was created from the results of a survey to 644 pupils in the 5th and 6th grades asking about how they like to live life in the classroom group. The following 5 factors were found from the answers: other-focus, teacher-focus, self-focus, enjoyment-focus and close-friend-focus. Inter consistency of these factors proved the scale reliability. Relation between the factors and classroom climate showed the validity of the scale. Regarding gender differences, girls had higher scores on other-focus, and boysʼ scores were higher on self-focus and enjoyment-focus. Difference in school years was as follows: 5th graders had higher scores on other-focus and teacher-focus, while 6th gradersʼ scores were higher on enjoyment-focus.

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[in Japanese]

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This article examined college-level PjBL (project-based learning) research results, or more precisely, their failings and remediation of schemes. Those findings should help learning in primary/ secondary education to be more flexible and active, which is a goal of the Period of Integrated Studies. The results revealed that teachers are the key to facilitate learners to acquire cooperation orientation, then they get ready to become active and flexible through PjBL. Moreover, this paper discussed needs of modifying PjBL for primary/ secondary classrooms: their classroom groups are fixed for learning and community building as well, so PjBL in the primary/ secondary education context must be tailored according to the characteristics of the fixed classroom group system.

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