Consumer education has come to be regarded as an especially important area of life-long education. This education, however, is not taken up except in the limited adult classes. The opinion that consumer education should be started at an earlier stage of life has gradually been prevalent, nation-wide. In Hyogo Prefecture, "Korekara-no-kurashi" was published in 1974 and distributed to all junior high schools in the prefecture as a supplementary textbook, which has been used for the past three years. We, therefore, expect to know how junior high schools have actually taken consumer education into their teaching program. The results of the survey are : 1. The percentage of the schools where "Korekara-no-kurashi" is used in class is 36.5%. 2. The chief reasons for the low percentage of utilization are : (1) limited school hours, and (2) difficulty in obtaining cooperation and understanding from teachers of other subjects. 3. Many teachers wish for (1) short course to be given in how to use the supplementary textbook, (2) improvement of illustration, and (3) earlier distribution of the book. 4. 71.6% of the teachers answering the questionnaire regard its contents referring to clothing problems as appropriate and useful.

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This report is on the study of contents referring to diet of "Korekara-no-kurashi". The supplementary textbook deals with foods most familiar to junior high school students, which may make the book rather helpful as a teaching material used in combination with the authorized textbook. If the book is used for teaching students from the first to third grades of junior high school, it is advisable to add items necessary to promote consumer education further. It is suggested that the contents should be rearranged and divided into the following two chapters : (1) Safe diet, and (2) Reasonable diet.

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The supplementary textbook "Korekara-no-kurashi" contains not the slightest allusion to childcare. Considering its connection with the contents of the school textbook, we think it necessary that the study of children's toys, in which even junior high school students may be interested, should be included in the book. Similar opinions are given by some of the teachers in response to our questionnaire, so we took up the subject from the standpoint of consumer education. In conclusion, we would like to lay stress on the importance of consumer education as a part of life-long education.

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The aim of the present paper is to review the contents and methods for teaching consumer education in home economics education in Japan and the U.S. Fourteen supplementary readers issued by Japanese local government agencies and four pilot programs developed by U.S. home economics educational specialists, were analysed. The results are as follows : 1. Japanese booklets uniformly allocated most of their space to providing factual knowledge on consumer goods. All, but one, were aligned for the use in the present framework of homemaking courses in schools, being far from developing a framework for teaching consumer education. 2. California, Massachusetts, and Colorado Consumer Education Curriculum were, on the whole, content-oriented, and proved to lay more emphasis on value-exploring and decisionmaking issues. North Dakota's Curriculum proved to be designed to enable learners to function as questioning, creative and critical consumers. 3. In integrating consumer education into homemaking courses in Japanese schools in the future, it is highly desirable that home economics educational specialists should take leadership not only in organizing materials to match the learners' interest and progress of development, but also in developing modules that would focus on the learners' processes of developing consumer abilities, skills and understandings rather than on their acquisition of information or content.

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In order to study the methods in teaching meal planning, I have investigated the practice in the menu study of students in Junior High School, and the meal planning of homemakers in the students' homes. Following results were obtained. 1. For students, the number of responses on "contents were understood" and "menu study is necessary" was the highest for first year students and the lowest for second year students. 43% of the second year students responded that the study was difficult. 2. For homemakers, the number of homes that did not plan the menu beforehand was 71%, and the majority of its reason was that it was not necessary to plan beforehand. As for the foodstuffs which the homemakers had used, the sixth group was about 42% and the fourth group was 30%. Responses to "menu planning learned in school is useful in the home" was 30%. As a result of this investigation, it is felt that we should proceed with our teaching meal planning in Junior High School along the following lines : 1. To select goals and contents of menu planning carefully, to clarify the important points and to teach the basic things thoroughly. 2. To connect menu planning with actual cooking and its extension to practical training. 3. To limit the foodstuffs to the basic groups.

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Object : In cooking practices, some students are seen to be chatting and idling during the group study which should be done by all group members. The author made this investigation in order to get some knowledge of how the number of study group members would influence the proportion of idle hands or the way of their participation in the group study. Procedure : The author took up the case of liberal course freshmen who attended the course of general home economics. All the freshmen were divided into two classes, one of which consisted of several groups of three students, the other consisted of several groups of five students. Each group had a practice, making use of the same teaching materials, under the same teacher, on the same day. The author analyzed the students' practice activities and measured the proportion of idle hands and examined the general tendency of their group activities. Result : As several students were absent from school, it so happened that the number of the group study members became two, or four. So the author also got a survey of the study groups made up of two or four students. As a result, the following facts were obtained. As the study group became larger, 1. the proportion of idle hands became greater, 2. the degree of the students' dexterity became smaller, 3. each group member became more dependent upon the other members, 4. the students' participation in their group study was apt to be concentrated to some specified activities.

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The aims of this study was to measure senior high school students' maternal consciousness and to make clear the relation between the formative factors and learning effects. The questionnaires were sent to 1,438 girl students in Hiroshima prefecture in 1976. Then a panel survey was carried out for 373 students who had taken nursery study during the same year. The results are summarized as follows : Senior high school students' maternal consciousness could be measured by their interest and attention toward infants and sex receptivity. The measurement value was examined according to differences in school years, courses taken and regional differences. The formative factors of maternal consciousness proved to be under the influence of experience in contact with infants and identity with their mothers. The effect of nursery teaching proved to work better in the third grade than in the first grade and also varied according to teaching method.

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