The purpose of this study is an examination of critical thinking abilities in home economics classes based on a critical thinking theory of R. H. Ennis to clear specifically what kind of abilities for critical thinking in home economics. Ennis defines critical thinking as“ reflective and reasonable thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Ennis, 1985, p. 45). Furthermore, Ennis considers critical thinking as a creative and practical action and placed importance on rationality and reflection. Ennis regards critical thinking process as being connected to decision making and shows abilities and construction of critical thinking basis on this theory. Ennis refers to clarity, basis, inference, and interaction as constitutes critical thinking abilities in detail. For setting up hypothesis of theory of critical thinking abilities in home economics, clarity and interaction are picked up. Ennis regards clarity as an ability that leads to a problem discovery and a problem solving, and, interaction as one that leads to an ability of thinking diversely and objectively to grasp own life and ability that develop one’s thought and opinion. These abilities are considered to be equivalent to ability to analyze own life and ability to form opinions by examining things closely and selecting things carefully to think objectively and diversely and to develop thought and opinion that are regarded as important in home economics education. Based on Ennis’s theory it is hypothesized that critical thinking abilities in home economics involve clarification of own life, clarification of the problem, reflection to make an action, and clarification of the action in own life. These abilities are thought to enable one to create the action in own life. Undergoing the critical thinking process, through clarification of own life and clarification of the problem, students are expected to reflection to make an action in real life, and to create an action in the real life by clarification of the action in own life, connected to decision making. And interaction affects each factor to encourage acquiring abilities for critical thinking.

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This study aims to assess the effectiveness of formative feedback through the regulation of problemsolving type lessons in a first grade mathematics classroom. In problem-solving type lessons, children are required to solve a problem responsibly and actively to enhance mathematical thinking and attitude. The research presented here is based on a methodology developed by Mottier Lopez and Allal (2007) to investigate the interactive regulation of learning identifiable as sociomathematical norms in classroom microcultures. Seven types of formative feedback were identified in classroom discourse: teacher’s descriptive feedback, teacher’s inquiry feedback, teacher’s evidence-based feedback, pupils’ evaluative feedback, pupils’ descriptive feedback, pupils’ inquiry feedback, and pupils’ evidence-based feedback. Focusing on two interactive episodes, the effectiveness of formative feedback by the regulation of learning process was shown in respect of pupils’ attainment of mathematical learning goal and good relationship with their classmates. These findings clearly demonstrated that formative feedback was particularly effective in the regulation of learning in the first grade mathematics classroom.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate both a teacher’s actual response and the students’ expected response to students’ wrong answers in a junior high school science class, and to suggest the manner of instruction for science lessons. The teacher’s actual response to students’ wrong answers were analyzed using the data of the third Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study second phase (TIMSS-R) by International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s (IEA) Lesson Video Study that took 95 hours of 8th grade Japanese science lessons. Then an original questionnaire developed in this study based on the protocol analysis results was used to investigate feedback students expected from their teachers when they answered incorrectly. Four hundred fifty-one 7th to 9th grade students from a public school responded to the questionnaire. Based on the results of the survey, the following conclusions were made: (1) In reality, teachers tended to call on the same student who answered incorrectly and not on others to answer the given question; (2) The 7th grade students tend to expect affective response when they gave a wrong answer in their science class; (3) On the other hand, the 9th grade students tend to expect cognitive response. These results suggest at the essential nature of modifying teaching method in accordance with the differing expectations in each grade. Providing hints to 7th grade students is recommended and, providing more explanations on the topic being discussed for the 8th and 9th grade students, and asking same questions and making students come up with its answer on their own for 9th grade students. Also, the teacher needed to provide guidance with consideration to students’ emotional and cognitive responses.

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The aims of this longitudinal research are to examine the following two points: (1) changes of social thinking ability and judgment ability of junior high school students during one academic year period; (2) longitudinal relationships between five abilities (fact judgment ability, inductive reasoning ability, deductive reasoning ability, social judgment ability, and critical thinking ability) which are considered to compose social thinking ability and judgment ability. Results of analyses showed that social thinking ability and judgment ability of junior high school students generally improve during one school year. Specifically, improvement of the abilities during one year from the second grade to the third grade are more likely to be larger than during the same period between first grade to second grade. In addition, the five abilities considered to compose social thinking ability and judgment ability were found to be mutually linked and not independent.

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Keeping in mind the issues surrounding the dwelling life education in high school home economics, teaching materials were developed from the following two viewpoints: 1) Students can obtain basic knowledge even with limited class hours, and 2) Students can learn proactively to utilize the knowledge obtained into actual life. In particular, a bird’s-eye view was incorporated in the teaching materials for the second viewpoint above. Classes were taught using the teaching materials thus developed, and the students were tested and asked to complete a questionnaire. The test results clearly showed that most of the students obtained basic knowledge. It was also inferable from the survey responses that most of the students’ recognition of dwelling life improved and that they were trying to utilize what they learned in their lives. Above results suggest that the teaching materials developed in this study were effective.

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The effects of collaborative learning on the development of problem-solving skills were examined in this case study. The small group work called collaborative learning, that enhanced brain storming and scaffolding by metacognition on general heuristics and specific patterns of reasoning, had been implemented in order to aid 17 first year university students to solve the problems creatively in the basic seminar in 2014. The comparison of the pre- and post-tests, indicated that the performance on problem solving and qualitative levels of thinking strategies including knowledge application skills, such as classification, hypothesis testing and causal reasoning significantly improved. Thus, it could be concluded that developing of problem solving skills could be possible by mean of the collaborative learning.

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The present study explores how three factors (Japanese language proficiency, grammatical aspect, and lexical aspect) influence the acquisition of the Japanese imperfective aspect marker -teiru by Taiwanese learners of Japanese. The study is based on multivariate analyses of examples from the Corpus of Taiwanese Learner of Japanese (CTLJ). The results of the classification tree analysis of Japanese compositions written by 40 Taiwanese learners during the course of two years showed that the multiple meanings of the Japanese imperfective aspect marker –teiru had a stronger effect than the lexical aspect of Japanese verbs on the use of –teiru, and the learners’ Japanese language proficiency was the weakest factor that influenced the acquisition of –teiru.

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This paper focuses on the Concept Categorization Learning (CCL) lesson processes and the need to include three learning steps within CCL in the elementary social studies classes. In the CCL, the learners acquire the targeted concepts from the learning materials through categorizing concepts, and they deepen social cognition through further applying the target concepts to other real-life situations. The first of three steps is to learn the materials so that the learners construct a framework (a preceding organizer) as a base to extract the meaning and contents of the target concepts. At the second step, the learners continuously reason with analogy, identify and categorize (through comparison with preceding organizers, explanation of their functions), then subsume into higher concepts (constructing new proceeding organizers). As the learners categorize concepts, they acknowledge the importance of the target concepts in the society. At the third step, pupils critically view the learning materials so that they deepen the social cognition of the targeted concepts. Simultaneously, the connection between the learners and the concept is explored for deeper citizenship awareness of their own. Such structure of the CCL lessons will allow pupils to smoothly categorize concepts and reflect on their own lives and existences while examining the effectiveness of the target concepts.

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This study aimed to theoretically explain the social perception formation process of the children during the concept constructive classes in a typical social studies class using a constructive evaluation model. The classes included a mix of five types of awareness formation aspects. One participant was extracted from each type. Each individual’s awareness formation process was analyzed using the constructive evaluation model, and compared. As a result, an association between cause and effect through the comparison between the perception of the self and others appeared to be the turning point between a leap and a setback, which was a characteristic of the perception formation process in the classes. Based on this discovery, a better way of teaching was proposed. 　　 The following are the four significant findings of this study: 1) the identification of five types of perception in the classes and the validation of the individual awareness construction process; 2) the validation of reasons for which the individual awareness formation processes in the corresponding classes were different; 3) an indication of the definite evaluation of the awareness formation process; and 4) the clarification of aspects of children’s learning that are abstracted in solely objective-based evaluation.

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