Transactions of Japan Society for Vocational Education and Training

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Assessment of job performance or managerial (technical and non-technical) skills is important but problematic, since such ratings have many difficulties for standardization and tend to be fairly subjective. Likewise, applying the latest research findings to practices and research is required in order to measure those skills, especially human skills recently, in the Polytechnic Colleges and the Polytechnic University. Thus, this paper reviews recent empirical studies on managerial skills in relevant academic fields (i.e. psychology, business administration, and education), seeking both practical and theoretical implications. Three categories of research interest are emerged through our review process: (a) “rating validity” approach focuses on construct validity of a rating scale; (b) “performance predictivity” approach makes more efforts for improving a model’s predict ability of organizational performance; (c) “process interactivity” approach explores ratees' cognitive differences and interactive processes between raters and ratees. Main findings by prior studies and their implications for practices and further studies in occupational competence development are discussed. Key words: human skills, job performance, demonstrable modeling, occupational competence development

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The group organization problem is a combinatorial optimization problem. This paper attempts to explore the solutions to the problems. The following case is treated : Students are to be allocated to groups of which the subjects are shown in advance. The conditions are that they ought to be assigned to their groups as preferable as possible, and that their abilities should be almost in equilibrium among groups. It is a multi-objective problem, which is rather difficult to solve manually. The conception of Pareto optimal solutions is used to treat multi-objective problems. One of the techniques to solve that kind of problems is MOPSO (Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization). This study tries to search the quasi-optimal solutions to the group organization problem, using MOPSO. The effect of applying MOPSO originally intended for continuous optimization problems to the above case is considered.

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This is a report of a consideration on the main themes of ‘vocational ethics for engineer.’ They are: technology, relationships between technology and the concerned persons, and the social process in which technology is involved. They are to be studied on three theoretical bases: technological, ethical and sociological theories. About the ethical basis, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology of Kant, and ‘cooperation’ of Hegel are considered in this paper.

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Grounding is necessary for almost all electrical equipment and appliance. The grounding electrode is installed under the ground, therefore which is in the soil for a long time period. The grounding electrode can be damaged by corrosion. There are two kinds of corrosion, i.e., wet corrosion and dry corrosion. The wet corrosion is a primary phenomenon occurring in the soil. An application of woodceramics, which is a carbon material made from woody material, is focused on tolerance to corrosion. Copper and woodceramics electrodes are set in sodium chloride solution or artificial sea water, and then the corrosion potential and current are measured. As a result, the corrosion current was detected at copper electrode. However, with woodceramics electrode, the current with electrolysis for sodium chloride solution was detected, corrosion current was not detected. Hence, it is indicated that woodceramics has resistant to corrosion for sea water as compared with copper.

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