This study was conducted to examine the belief of teachers, mothers and students regarding reasons why certain children were performing poorly.
In the first study, we mabe a new method designated as a Case Rating Scale, and examined testretest reliability and internal consistency of the scale. The Case Rating Scale consisted of 6 different fictious scenarios describing poorly performing pupils. Reading each scenario, subject were requested to answer three kinds of questions. First, they rated the extent to which the poorly performing pupils were due to each of 11 causal factors such as pupil's poor effort and teacher's unskillful teaching method etc. Second, subjects assigned the magnitude of possibility for the pupils to show a better school record in the future. Third, subjects were questioned about guidance of these pupils from two points of views; (i) who is appropiriate as a person guiding the pupils,(ii) what rate of praise and criticism should be taken.
Subjects were 141 students in an educational university and a nurse's college. The Case Rating Scale was administered to them twice at an interval of two weeks.
The results indicated that both test-retest reliability and internal consistency of the subscales in the Case Rating Scale were adequate except the subscale composed of the third question (i) mentioned above. Therefore, we concluded, though only the third question (i) was to be excluded, the Case Rating Scale was reliable enough to investigate causal attributions.
The purpose of the second study was to make clear the followings: (1) the differenec in causal attributions among teachers, mothers and students,(2) the relation between causal attributions and possibility for the pupil to show a better school record, and (3) the relation between causal attributions and the rate of praise and criticism. Subjects were 114 teachers, 100 mothers and 117 students. Main results were as follows.
1. The teachers held lack of an ability factor of pupils as being more responsible for poor performance than other subjects. On the other hand, teacher's unskillful teaching method was viewed as much less of a factor determining poor performance. These results showing by the teachers supported the self-serving bias.
2. The mothers attached more importance to attrbution for teacher's unskillful teaching method than the teachers. This result was in accordance with the self-serving bias as above. But the unexpected result was shown that they attributed the cause more intensely to their own factors.
3. The multiple discriminant analysis was conducted to clarify furthermore the difference among three kinds of subjects. For the first discriminant function which made clear the difference between the mother group and the student group, the most important causal factors were parents' ill discipline for children and unluck. The second discriminant function seemed to mean controllable vs. uncontrollable attribution, and discriminated mainly between the mother group and the teacher group.
4. From the multiple regression analysis, it was found in the teacher group and the student group that the extent of attribution to the lack of an ability of pupils could predict the magnitude of impossibility for the pupils to show a better school record in the future, but the same result was not shown in the mother group.
5. The relation between causal attributions and the rate of praise and criticism was obscure in all groups.
In discussion, we considered the following items: the Case Rating Scale, teachers' learned helplessness for the poorly performing pupil, sampling errors, the difficulty to measure how to guide the pupils etc.

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The purposes of the present study were to construct an Alienation Scale and to investigate developmental change during adolescence, and to clarify the relationship between alienation and adjustment.
The first study was designed in order to construct a psychological scale of alienation.
72 items were selected according to the concept of alienation as a psychological term. Then, these items were administered to 272 subjects and analysed by means of item- and factor-analysis. Consequently, the alienation scale consisted of 44 items which could be divided into 4 factors, i. e., the feeling of loneliness, emptiness, oppression-restriction, and selfcontempt.(see TABLE 1)
Next, the reliability and the validity of this scale were examined. The reliability coefficients assessed by the split-half method were very high (r_??_0.95). In the analysis of the stability of the scale, two intervals (a month, a year) were set up. The correlation coefficients were relatively high in a month interval, but in the case of one year, low correlations were seen in some subscales of alienation. It would suggest that the concept of alienation consisted of two facets, i. e., comparatively stable dimension related to personality and the more sensitive dimension to the external factors (circumstances). Furthermore, criterion-related validity and construct validity were found.(see TABLE2, 3, 4)
The second study was designed to examine developmental change of alienation scores in adolescence and to clarify the relationship between alienation and adjustment. The main findings were as follows;
1. The alienation scores decreased developmentally during adolescence. And sex differences were seen in the subscale of self-contempt.(see TABLE 5)
2. Alienation had a significant negative correlation with ego identity score.(see TABLE 6)
3. Problem students, such as delinquents selected by the teacher, showed significantly higher alienation scores than non-problem students.(see TABLE7, 8)

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There are two kinds of speech unfluencies found very frequently in Japanese elementary school low graders, which are called “additional sounds (ASs)” and “emphasizings (EMS)” in this study. The AS is a single syllable with duration of more than one mora (e. g.“ne” in “onnanoko ga ne koronda[a girl fell down]”), the EM is the emphasis of the last syllable of a phrase with more than half a mora long (e. g.“1” in “onnanoko gá koronda”), and both are located at the endings of phrases.
This study was undertaken to elucidate the functional role of such unfluencies and the functional relation between them. It was hypothesized that ASs and EMs should occur depending on speech difficulty (Hypothesis I), and that ASs and EMs should be substitutable for each other when either could not occur in a certain interpersonal situation (Hypothesis II).
In Experiment I, each of 36 first graders and 34 fourth graders was given one of two speech tasks varied in terms of the degree of difficulty none of two interpersonal situations varied in terms of the degree of intimacy; one task was to look at a picture for a while and then describe it while looking at it (speech with the picture: SWP), and the other without it (speech without the picture: SWOP); one situation was a chat with a friend (speech to a friend: STF), and the other a report to a teacher (speech to a teacher: STT). The results in both graders were identical as follows.(A) The task effect was unsignificant on each incidence of the unfluencies, and Hypothesis I could not be supported.(B) The incidence of ASs in STF was higher than that in STT and, in contrast, the incidence of EMs in STF was lower than that in STT. Furthermore, the combined incidences of ASs and EMs were not differentiated significantly between STF and STT whose effects on the occurrence of such unfluencies were guaranteed to be almost equal by the pilot study. Thus, it was proved that ASs and EMs were distributed complementarily, supporting Hypothesis II.(C) The interaction between the main factors was not detected.
In Experiment II, Hypothesis I was re-tested on ASs only. The failure in Experiment I was thought to be due to the unvaried degree of speech difficulty. Each first grader was asked to try either SWP or SWOP repeatedly so that in SWP he or she could take a picture as a help for fluent description. In the later trial, the incidence of ASsin SWP was significantly lower than that in SWOP. This result was interpreted as indicating that, in SWP, ASs became dispensable as the pictureacquired greater power to help the speech process. Thus, Hypothesis I was thought to de plausible.
Experiment III was the controlled one to exclude another interpretation of the result in Experiment II. It was also likely that, in the later SWP trial, eye contact between the subject and the experimenter might be considerably lost because of the subject's much attention to the picture. Possible as it is, however, there was no significant differences between the face-to-face speech and the back-to-back speech of new first graders on the incidence of ASs.
Finally, it was concluded that such lacks of fluency in the additional sounds played the role of aids for the speech production of the children on their way to language development, and that the additional sounds and their emphasizings were two of the variations of such aids; therefore, one was bound to occur as the other remained impossible in a certain Situation.

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The purpose of this research is to establish the facilitative effect of a training Procedure on children's ordering of objects concurrently on two dimensions.
The subjects were fifty-two nursery school children ranging in age from 5: 2 to 6: 4. They were tested and trained individually. In a test session, each subject was presented a matrix, in which nine cylinders were arranged in 3×3 formation according to their height and width. The cylinders being all scrambled by the experimenter, the subject was required to reconstruct the matrix (reproduction task). Every subject had to perform three reproduction tasks in one test session, and every subject had three test sessions: one before the training, another one immediately after, and a third one on the day following the training.
In the training session, half of the subjects (experimental group) were presented a matrix with a camera, a picture of an open-air fire, and a picture of a snowman around it. Also, they were given the rationale of the arrangement of the cylinders in the matrix, as: all the cylinders were persons; they were arranged so (on height) that all of them could sit for the camera; also, they were arranged so (on width) that the scantily-clad persons would be near the open-air fire, and that the thickly dressed persons would be near the snowman. Then, leaving the camera and the two pictures intact, they were to perform the reproduction task. They would receive the feedback from the experimenter, after the last cylinder had been placed. The procedure mentioned above would be repeated three times. The other half of the subjects (control group), in this session, had to perform three reproduction tasks without any clues such as pictures, except the feedback from the experimenter.
In the training session, the experimental group exceeded the control group in the number of the subjects who successfully reproduced more than two original matrices. In the test given immediately after the training, the experimental group was superior to the control group, in terms of the mean of “classification score,” one of the three measures of the approximation of reproduced matrix to the original one. On the day following the training, the superiority of the experimental group to the control group was identified in terms of each of the three measures of approximation.
The obtained results were discussed: the training procedure for the experimental group having improved children's skills needed for bidimensional ordering, particularly concerning their skill of classifying objects on width.

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The purpose of this paper is to identity children's internal process during production of writings. A new procedure was devised to deal with the problem of estimating the internal dynamics of children from 8 to 12 years of age. At first, a simple procedural model of discourse production was presented; then, where and how long pauses were generated during writing was recorded for each child subject. Each child was also interviewed for the introspective report of what he or she thought at each pause. Then, the model and independently analyzed introspective and behavioral data were studied together to find a new model of the writing process. This procedure succeeded in identifying15strategies that may work in production of writings. Furthermore, the results also suggest the following. First, children's writing plans function not merely for controlling the writing process itself, but also for a global monitoring on whether the ongoing process matched what the writer wanted to do. Second, combination of strategies results in four kinds of writing style, all distributed in the age bracket studied. Thus, writing style seemed to depend mainly on individuals and possibly on contexts, though some age trends were detected.
Next, proceeding to more specific problems, two points were investigated by the second and complementary experiment; i. e., whether writing style could be changed externally, and how plan monitoring would work. The first point, flexibility of writing style, was examined in a similar way as the first experiment except that each child was allowed to plan ahead for five minutes before starting writing. The result showed that some (but not all) children were apt to change writing style to one that generated a global plan and work under it. The second point, plan monitoring, was investigated by using recall of subjects' own writings a week later. It was shown that the way to recall depended on the original writing style, and children who wrote in a style with a global plan generally provided, good performance of recall. It implies, at least indirectly, that making global plans were useful for monitoring the process of writing.
From the analysis of the model and experimental data, it was suggested that the writing process was a process of adaptively organizing various writing strategies: it might be the cause of an apparent variety of children's writings showing many degrees of freedom of procedural organization in such an adaptive process. But it was also suggested that there existed some constancy in the way using strategies. The set of these two complementary aspects did not seem to be specific to children's writing, thongh. It seemed to reflect the general characteristics of a divergent, ill-structured problem-solving process.

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