For students in the early childhood care and education course, a feeling of fitness to work in childcare is a major determining factor that affects anticipation of enhanced feelings of satisfaction, interest, and commitment with regard to childcare work. Focusing on feeling of fitness to work in childcare, this study showed empirically the cause and effect relationship from the time students enter junior college through to the time they graduate. Specifically, feeling of fitness to work in childcare was longitudinally measured for 993 junior college students in the early childhood care and education course, and an examination was conducted by use of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), including the relation with sense of identity. The results of SEM suggested that (1) feeling of fitness of students when they enter junior college has a positive effect on feeling of fitness when they graduate; (2) sense of identity of students when they enter junior college has a positive effect on feeling of fitness in both periods. This indicates how essential it is to have support that focuses on identity formation and feeling of fitness to work in childcare worker training.

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We performed this study to examine variables related to childcare support according to the goal orientation of caretakers. The first objective was to elucidate the goal orientations of caretakers. The second objective was to examine the relationships between maternal goal orientation and the following factors: childcare stress, parenting satisfaction, and sense of subjective well-being. Our results demonstrated that goal orientation may be represented as a two-factor structure: interpersonal experience/growth goals and performance goals. When caretakers had a high interpersonal experience/growth goal, they displayed low child care-related stress. In contrast, when caretakers had a high-performance goal they exhibited high child-care stress. Finally, when caretakers had a high interpersonal experience/growth goal they exhibited strong parental satisfaction.

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This study aims to construct a cause-and-effect model of teaching anxiety of elementary school teachers in charge of Foreign Language Activities in the 5th/6th grade in order to identify issues and challenges these teachers face. With an exploratory factor analysis and a reliability analysis, seven significant factors relating to teaching anxiety have been identified based on the data collected by a questionnaire which was distributed to 223 elementary school teachers who took part in a mandatory 10-year-experienced teacher training program in Osaka. As a result of a covariance structure analysis, a cause-and-effect model of foreign language teaching anxiety with a fairly high goodness-of-fit ratio was constructed. Curriculum-related and instruction-related anxiety is caused directly from ‘teaching profession anxiety’ which derives from English language instructional anxiety stemming from ‘English language proficiency anxiety’. The anxiety for the target language comes under the strong influence of a low sense of achievement in English language skills. Based upon the findings, several improvement measures for teacher training programs are discussed.

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