It is necessary to promote human relation skills in the education of fundamental nursing. Using the idea of counseling in class is said to be effective in order to make students form better human relationship. In this paper, I would like to demonstrate 1) what process students trace when they understand themselves, and 2) what kind of changes occur when students can attain self-understanding, through classes utilizing the idea of counseling.

　By analyzing the brief reports and the term papers. I found there were the following four stages in the self-understanding process.

　1. Few students had had experiences of analyzing themselves before the class began.

　2. At the very early stages of the class, there were some students who could not understand themselves even when they tried to analyze themselves.

　3. Then, they came to the third stage where they awoke to vague self-understanding, and they began to think they understood themselves better than they did before.

　4. Finally they came to have self-understanding more deeply. At this final stage, they could notice their change they had had through the class or tyey could define their goal more precisely.

　Thus, I have found that the class for self-understanding helped students to accept themselves more positively, establish their own self-concept, and develop skills to improve their interpersonal relationship in their professional settings.

　The purpose of this study is to clarify how the images of "life" and "death" in nursing students change by reading the stories on the subject of "life" and "death". I asked some nursing students to read 5 different kinds of stories dealing with "life" and "death" and then investigated the change of the''life" and''death" images in nursing students after reading the stories. The results indicate that the images of "life" and "death" in nursing students consist of two-factor structures: One is "emotion" and the other is "evaluation". With regard to "life", its image was positive in both "emotion" and "evaluation" before reading and any change in its image was not recognized after reading. On the other hand, the image of "death" was something negative such as "sad" and "dark" in "emotion" and something positive including "thinking" and "important" in "evaluation". After reading, some negative emotional images of death were improved to positiveones. "death education" aims to alleviate excessive fear and anxiety for death and affirm life. It can be concluded that the results of this study will become a reference to help demonstrate the effectiveness of the "death education".

　The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that influence the self-efficacy of nursing students in practical education and consider way to increase this self-efficacy.

　We conducted interview with 17 students using an interview protocol based on Bandura's theories of self-efficacy. As a result, the following trends were clearly observed.

1.Self-efficacy of students was likely to increase when students:

　・had good relationship with patients,

　・felt that they could help their patients,

　・could see or feel that their care had a positive effect on their patients,

　・were motivated to study through the practice and obtained practical knowledge and social manners.

2.Students' self-efficacy was high when they received good evaluations and were given praise by others. When they received bad evaluations, however, self-efficacy fell.

3.The role-models they chose : teachers, nurses, fellow students, mothers, and other medical staff, had an effect, positive or negative, on their self-efficacy.

4.Students' mental status was positively influenced by the degree of confluence between workrelated preference and the department they were placed in, relationships with patients and teachers, students' body condition, and smooth progress of their practice.

　This study suggests that in order to maximize students' self-efficacy teachers must work on improving their own interpersonal relationship skill as well as considering education method for supporting group learning, maintaining a positive training environment and endeavor to help a successful learning experience for their students.