The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between stress in students’ daily life and stress in technological activities within the material processing unit of technology education. A survey was conducted with 459 junior high school students using“ Stress Reaction Scale for Junior High School Students” (Yamamoto & Fukui, 2009) and an open-ended question for gauging student stress in technological activities. The classification of the free descriptions using“ category of stress occurred in technological activities” (Nakahara & Moriyama, 2012) showed that 28.8％ of the students felt stress such as“ dissatisfaction and irritation”,“ regret for failuring,” and so on. Also, although there was no significant relationship between stress in daily life and stress in technological activities among the boys significant relationship was observed between“ anger and attack” reaction and“ regret for failuring”, between both‘ despair’ and“ staying indoors” reactions and“ feeling of difficulties and anxiety” among girls. These results led to discussion on appropriate strategies for supporting students who felt stress in technological activities in Material Processing Unit.

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In this paper, the author look at Mathematics Study Group with the aim of developing “cooperative mathematical competency,” defined as mathematical excellence demonstrated through collaboration in a group. The lesson was carried out over two consecutive years: In the first year, 12 junior high school students who knew each other participated; in the second year, seven students of different ages from different junior high schools took part. The participants’ responses to the questionnaires indicate that they had possessed a fixed and absolute image of math and math learning, and that this image was changed into a more flexible and relative one after the lesson.

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Native creation’s educational usefulness is occasionally doubted and its unclear instruction principle and method are questioned. It will be important to answer these questions to improve the effectiveness of narrative creation instruction. Nobuko Uchida’s writings are used to address these problems. Uchida’s articles about the mechanism of the word development and story writing, but there are very few studies and books about narrative creation which employ her viewpoint. Through the examination and discussion of Uchida’s articles and this study extracts usefulness of the narrative creation and its value for curriculum development in the following ways (1) emphasizing the basic writing skills that support creation writing. (2) identifying and defining the essential definition and component of the narrative, which should be applied to “helping children gain creation strategies (3) focusing on the heuristic and problem-solving process for creation; (4) helping children imagine themselves as readers and monitor their writing behavior accordingly; (5) developing a curriculum that connects writing to reading. I expect these points to address the doubts and questions about the“ narrative creation activity and are conducive to improvement of the“ narrative creation” instruction.

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The following two problems exist in the childcare study of 2008 version for the junior high school technology and home economics course: Lack of ①objective for the purpose of the childcare lesson on the relationship between the student and a child and ②an objective method to assess students’ “personality formation.” This research followed the lesson research, the Flour Baby Project (FBP), through which the Junior High School Attached to the Faculty of Education, Okayama University aimed to solve the former problem. Moreover, we developed a scale FBP-Learning Effect (FBP-LE), which evaluates the students’ psychological tendencies for the purpose of addressing the latter problem. FBP-LE consists of the self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965) and six factors for human relationships (family/children), which are used to evaluate the students themselves and their relationship with others. In addition, we conducted a pilot study and checked the reliability of the FBP-LE. Before and after the FBP lesson, FBP-LE study was carried out for 97 students (48 boys and 49 girls) who had studied childcare in June 2008. As a result of the FBP lesson, the students reported to have strengthened the “relationship between themselves and the people in the society” and increased a “sense of trust in self and in others” through the FBP lesson. Furthermore, the students, particularly who with a high degree of self-esteem, seemed to consider things from parents’ perspectives after the FBP experience. From the results above, it was proved that we could apply the FBP-LE created by this research to evaluate students’ achievements in the family and childcare lesson in home economics classes at junior high schools. Furthermore, students’ self-esteem and factors about human relationships and to have increased through the FBP, and acting mutually towards others. As evaluated by a psychologist (see Harada & Sato, 2011), the FBP can contribute to addressing the pedagogical challenge of improving students’ self-esteem and form interpersonal relationships, particularly for children having difficulties with both, a situation which is a major concern of our country’s schools.

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In this study I examined the students’ tactical awareness during basketball games. The sixth-grade students wrote short comments after each basketball lesson and on the final reports at the end of last lesson. The students’ short comments were analyzed by applying KJ-Method. As a result of the analysis, three categories were extracted: “shot”, “penetration”, and “role”, and the students’ final reports were reviewed using the categories. The following points were suggested by the students’ final reports. ・Awareness of their mental attitude towards shots, including shooting without fearing failure, and guarding against the opponents’ shots while deliberately applying pressure. ・Consciousness of a goal for penetration, which means breaking through to the other team’s defenses leading to a shot, and defending their own side while remaining conscious of the goal. ・Awareness of their team’s organization within which each player perform his/her role. The result suggested that the emergence of students’ tactical awareness in competitive situations involving offense and defense can be explained by their successful and failure attempts in a game.

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The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for assessing conversational abilities in a small group discussion using a questionnaire survey based on a hypothesized model. To achieve this purpose, I conducted a survey with teachers at 20 elementary schools, asking about their students’ communicative abilities. As a result of the investigation, three factors for assessing students’ conversational abilities emerged: self-expression, understanding others, and meta-cognition. The importance of the meta-cognition factor for conversational abilities was discovered with pupils with higher meta-cognition showing higher levels of self-expression and understanding others. This tendency emerged in both students in lower and upper grades. Answers to the open-ended question indicated that 65.3 percent of teachers surveyed think items in the questionnaire would be useful to assess how each student develops conversational abilities.

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This paper clarifies the research philosophies and methodologies shared by researchers who have made significant contributions to the development of the field of social studies education. Our findings are primarily based on a targeted questionnaire survey sent to 121 board directors from two large social studies education association: the Japanese Association for the Social Studies (JASS) and Japanese Educational Research Association for the Social Studies (JERASS). The questionnaire consisted of 16 questions, including questions about respondents’ research interest, research methods, influences from research trends abroad, and their opinion on the roles that researchers are expected to play. The survey results indicated that there are seemingly bipolar views in terms of approaches to research; they are “research aiming to propose practical applications” and “research of historical documents and philosophical research.” The findings also suggested that the research interests of the respondents can be classified into “educational aims,” “subject matters,” and “children’s perceptions,” and the researchers’ interests seem to be influenced by the disciplines they encountered as graduate students. Meanwhile, the research orientations shared by majority of the respondents can be characterized as Japanese-style normativecomprehensive study on the school subject (Social Studies Education), which integrates the (1) practice, (2) research, (3) development/improvement, and (4) social services.

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A training program for in-service teacher on modeling chemical phenomenon is presented herein. A theme of the program was the whereabouts of substance’s dissolution, consisting of lectures, experiments, discussions, and a drawing and self-explanation work on models of chemical phenomenon. The program was tried out among 29 in-service elementary school teachers in Tokyo metropolis in June 2009 and August 2011. The results were the following: (1) According to the drawing and self-explanation work of teachers on modeling of a surfactant, it was not easy for the teachers to accurately draw the interaction between hair and hydrophobic group (lipophilic group) of shampoo and rinse. However, half of the teachers described accurate self-explanation based on proper understanding of the interaction by the surfactant. (2) According to a questionnaire given to the teachers after the trial, 70％ and more of the teachers reconstructed their existing images of surfactants and then express vivid the models. Moreover, 60％ or more of them changed their images and understood the surfactant concept. The program enabled the teachers to raise their levels of understanding of the chemical phenomenon through modeling.

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For researchers seeking to investigate research questions in more than one country, there are barriers of time, cost, languages and research methodologies and approaches to overcome. The previous studies indicated different research goals employ different research methods. For instance, the primary goal of Japanese social studies research is to explore questions such as ‘what is social studies’ or ‘what should be done’, while the goal of researches in the United States is to find ‘what is happening in actual situation’. The purposes of this study are to explore the perceptions of the research purposes and methods of the social studies education researchers in the US through based on the interviews of three researchers and to find the similarities and differences in the research purposes methods in the United States and Japan. Findings showed differences in the relationship between research and practice and the factors have influenced the researchers’ perceptions. The interviews did not clarify good or bad practices, but they attempted to know what is happening in reality. This is because that they believe that the role of researchers would provide the ‘mirror’ with which teachers can reflect on their classroom practices. In spite of small number of interviews, the findings of this study could help Japanese researchers to reflect their own research and find similar characteristics for their own studies.

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This study aimed to clarify whereabouts of the external control in the Course of Study by reconsidering two concepts: problem-solving and inquiry from a historical perspective. For the purpose of the study, we reviewed the diachronic development of the Course of Study for lower secondary schools and synchronic differences between the Course of Studies for primary and lower secondary schools revised in 1968 and 1969 respectively. Our review revealed the following about the external controls of the Course of Study for science classes: (1) they were mainly found in the political or social situation-public opinion-from a diachronic point of view and (2) in the cultural or educational situation-arguments-from a synchronic point of view.

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Recently the lesson studies in Japan have been the focus of great attention from within and outside Japan. However, previous studies have only interpreted the implementation status of the lesson study, while achievements and agendas resulting from lesson study have not been analyzed adequately. Hence, the present study tries to discover the implementation status of the lesson study, and analyze its achievements and agendas in detail for the development of lesson study. The research of public primary schools revealed that the lesson study was practiced extensively (100％). Particularly in schools where the relationship between teachers was well-established produced positive results from lesson study, unlike in schools without such a collaborative relationship between the teachers. Particularly, schools with teachers leading the lesson study achieved higher results. Furthermore, three important things for the improvement of lesson study were discovered to be necessarily: intention for cooperation between teachers and individual study, grooming of core leaders, and collaborative projects between researchers and teachers.

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