In recent years, social skills education (SSE) has been implemented with a high degree of effectiveness to facilitate social adjustment in children and adolescents. Schoolteachers mainly implement SSE, as a universal intervention. However, teachers have little opportunity to participate in training on SSE. Therefore, it was deemed necessary to provide opportunities to learn SSE during the period of training to become teachers. The purposes of the present study were to develop a SSE training program and to evaluate its effect on university students in teacher training courses. The training group (N =31) participated in fifteen sessions of a SSE training program that was designed to establish SSE knowledge and skills, whereas no special experience or training was given to the control group (N =25). All participants completed a questionnaire measuring self-efficacy for SSE, before and after the training program. The results indicated that, compared to the control group, students in the training group increased self-efficacy for SSE. These findings are discussed in terms of the context of training and methodological issues.

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Current usage of cell phone text messaging by adolescents and its relationship to their consciousness of loneliness were investigated. High school and undergraduate students (n = 601; Mean age 18.4 years; 305 male and 296 female) completed a questionnaire assessing the frequency of sending text messages, and the degree of cell phone dependency. They also completed four attitude scales that assessed the following: loneliness (Ochiai, 1983), dependence on cell phone text messaging (Yoshida, Takai, Motoyoshi, Igarashi, 2005), perceived effectiveness of cell phone text messaging (Igarashi & Yoshida, 2003), and awareness of independence (Kato & Takagi, 1980). Results indicated the excessive use of cell phone text messaging among people with loneliness at an immature stage, implied that they used text messaging in order to avoid loneliness. In addition, females showed a general tendency of excessive use of text messaging to seek for stable human relationships. Moreover, excessive users of text messaging seemed to have lower level awareness of independence than moderate users. These findings suggest that healthy maturity of the sense of loneliness in adolescence might be a key process to develop interpersonal relationships by means of cell phone messages.

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The purpose of this research was to clarify the role of guidance goals for school life in the relationship between stress responses and the personal characteristics of elementary school children. A total of 1,253 children in grades 2-6 in an elementary school completed non-anonymous inventories for a week in March. The scales used for the inventories are self-affirmation and stress responses, guidance goals for school life, and personal characteristics. The results were as follows. : 1) Following three guidance goals for school life significantly reduced stress: “sleeping well”, “good attitude in a lesson”, and “ cleaning”, 2) Three personal characteristics mediated the relationship between guidance goals and stress responses: “gratitude”, “self-affirmation”, and “communication skills”, 3) As a reflection of self-confidence, self-affirmation had the most pronounced mediating effect on the relationship between the guidance goals and stress responses. The results of this research support the use of guidance goals for school life to reduce stress reactions and suggest that the number of the school bullying and violence may be effectively decreased by this approach.

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The terms, “self-understanding” and “work understanding” had been used confusedly in the past. In this paper, these words, self-understanding and work understanding, will be redefined in relation to the career development. The relationship and the structure of career development including other steps will be discussed. As the results, the following 4 points were found: 1. Enlightening experiences have positive relationship with the self understanding and the work understanding 2. The readiness towards the work career or target direction has positive relation to one's self understanding rather than work understanding. 3. Understanding “One's own interest in the work or the enterprise”, or “personal capability and attitude necessary for the work or the company” has slightly positive relation to the career readiness, or target direction. On the other hand, 4. Self-understanding and work understanding are not sufficient to explain the career readiness, or target direction. This report suggests that the self-understanding of the work, their own capability, and the interest in the work and the sense of values should be essential for their career development in addition to their own work understanding.

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This is the practice report of a class teacher who continuously tried to help a child with the mental disabilities through plays. The child has begun to be unwilling to attend school when he entered the elementary school. At the beginning, the child built the basic relationship of mutual trust with the class teacher through playing while demanding physical contact. Then the child tried to check whether the class teacher received him while hitting a ball to his class teacher. In addition, the child deepened a relationship of mutual trust with the class teacher through building block play. Gradually, the child came to like to play with clay by entering his own world. And the child became psychologically independent while keeping some distance with the class teacher. Through these plays, the child built the relationship of mutual trust with the class teacher and was gradually not unwilling to attend school.

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The research on the effectiveness of specific Structured Group Encounter (SGE) has recently been practiced in various education fields. The existing SGE program has been applied to the students not attending to school in addition to the regular students. It is necessary to reconsider the existing program and to adjust its structure in order to apply it to the individual child who is mentally hurt from non-attendance of school. This research was to check the effectiveness of the SGE applied to 9 junior high-school students who are in a resource class established for the guidance towards the students who are not attending school. The original exercise program was designed and structured for the current subject students in a resource class. The effectiveness was measured before and after the SGE practice in the criteria on human relation, the mentality for self-esteem, and the anxiety for his or her future career. Successful results were observed in both decreasing the uneasiness of their future and improving self- esteem.

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