This study attempted to identify the factors that influenced learners’ motivation to participate in synchronous online classes. A questionnaire was created based on 73 university students’ responses to an open-ended question on factors that raised or lowered their motivation to participate in synchronous online classes. Using the questionnaire, data was gathered from 186 students at two women’s universities in Tokyo. The results of factor analyses indicated that the learners’ motivation was enhanced by “ease of participating in class,” “a feeling of working with others,” “ease of understanding the content,” “no need for commuting and moving between classrooms,” and “ease of expressing opinions and asking questions.” The results also showed that their motivation was reduced by “technical trouble,” “difficulty of communicating,” “a lack of challenge and fulfillment,” “an overwhelming amount of homework,” and “a feeling of fatigue.” The findings suggested that educators should pay careful attention to these factors to enhance and maintain learners’ motivation to participate in synchronous online classes.

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In elementary school home economics family learning, the authors gave a practice class in which students considered ways to improve family life using picture books. This study aims to clarify how the differences in the worksheets (WS) used in this class affect the learning effect. The authors compared WS-A, which was created to enrich students’ imaginative abilities, and WS-B, which was created to foster students’ abilities concerning the Japanese language. The results of the analysis of both WS showed that the students were able to describe ingenuity such concepts as “sharing roles” regardless of which WS was used. The ingenuity expressed in WS-B was abundant and concrete, and many ideas were suggested to their classmates. Conversely, the ingenuity expressed in WS-A was often abstract and instructed to their classmates. Comparing the pre- and post-questionnaires, the variety of words that come to mind when hearing about family members increased only in the WS-B group, and the word “role division” appeared in the “category on cooperation”.

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This study examined the effectiveness of a high school world history class format in which a textbook and PowerPoint presentation were used to explain the content of history, and the teacher answered questions generated by students using Google Forms, on interests in history and attitude toward independent inquiry-based learning. The results showed that the practical use value and private attainment value, which are considered to be included in the interests of history, increased significantly after the class, while the interest value did not increase significantly. Moreover, there was no difference between the pre- and post-questionnaires in adaptive help-seeking, which are thought to be important in promoting independent inquiry-based learning. There was also no effect of the number of questions generated on the interests in history and the attitude toward independent inquiry-based learning. These results indicate that this class format had a partial effect on the students' interests in history, but not enough on their attitude toward independent inquiry-based learning. Finally, we discussed the class format including educational media in the future.

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