The purpose of this paper is to clarify the educational outcomes of an Advanced Placement Information Education Program (henceforth, APIEP) using e-learning on the attainment of basic ICT skills by 118 first-year Japanese high school students at Ehime University senior high school, an APIEP model school, in the academic year 2017. There were 118 first-year students who took part in this study. All 118 students were instructed to take the same placement test before the study began and achievement test after completion. The students were then categorized into upper, middle and lower levels according to the achievement test results. These test results were then compared using a paired t-test. It was concluded, from the placement test results, that the improvement of skills was statistically significant in each group. It was discovered that a remarkable improvement was confirmed in the middle and lower level student groups and that they gained the basic ICT skills nearly equivalent to second-year university level. Furthermore, through a thorough analysis of survey questionnaire data conducted at the end of the final lesson, this study indicates that students perceived the e-learning program in a positive light regardless of their level. This study illustrates that the APIEP approach is an effective e-learning method for Japanese high school students.

In this study, we designed a team-based learning class for first-year pharmacy students, which includes basic chemistry and organic chemistry that can be applied to clinical pharmacy. We analyzed the changes in knowledge of the students and the impact of the class. The class resulted in students acquiring the knowledge of basic organic chemistry. Furthermore, the students were conscious that organic chemistry can be useful for solving clinical problems.

This study aimed to investigate how two types of reading training ― silent reading and whispering-to-oneself reading ― facilitate Japanese English-language learners’ listening comprehension. 117 university students were divided into four training groups according to the level of their listening comprehension and the types of training they were instructed to carry out as well as two control groups. A pre- and post-test were conducted on all of the six groups before and after the six-week training session. The results of a two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) showed that both the higher and lower level silent reading groups significantly improved their listening comprehension in comparison to the control groups. Whispering-to-oneself reading, on the other hand, was found to be effective only for the higher group; no significant differences were shown in the scores of the lower group. A possible interpretation for the difference in the performance between the silent reading and the whispering-to-oneself reading groups is that reading silently, without the cognitive load of vocalization, facilitated sentence comprehension in both levels. In contrast, whispering-to-oneself reading was effective in only the higher group as it was better at processing phonetic information. The results also suggest that silent reading is more applicable to learners at all levels and to the wider language education context, whereas the effect of whispering-to-oneself reading depends on the level of a learner.

This study examined the relationship between autonomous learning attitude and test performance (TOEIC^®) in first-year college students with low English proficiency. The three factors of self-efficacy, intrinsic value, and self-regulation were used as indicators of the autonomous learning attitude. Students were categorized into two types, an upper group and a lower group, according to the autonomous learning attitude, and the change in their test scores was analyzed. The results indicated that only the self-efficacy had a positive influence on the test score, and that the score improvement in the upper group was significantly higher than that in the lower group.