The purposes of the present study were to investigate the factor structure of proactive-reactive aggressiveness and to study the relationships among proactive-reactive aggressiveness, desire for antisocial behavior, and depressive tendencies in junior high school students.  The participants (603 junior high school students) completed a questionnaire that included proactive-reactive aggressiveness scales, the CES-D (depressive tendencies) scale, and 14 items about desire for antisocial behavior.  Confirmatory factor analysis revealed the optimal goodness-of-fit for an oblique three-factor model of aggressiveness, in which the factors were dominating proactive, egocentric proactive, and reactive.  Structural equation model (SEM) analysis revealed that reactive aggressiveness was positively related to depressive tendencies, whereas neither dominating nor egocentric proactive aggressiveness was.  The structural equation model analysis further revealed that all 3 of the aggressiveness factors were related to the boys’ desire for antisocial behavior, whereas only dominating proactive aggressiveness was related to the girls’ desire for antisocial behavior.  These results suggest that reactive-aggressiveness and proactive-aggressiveness play different roles in the psycho-social adjustment of junior high schools students, and that there are significant sex differences in the interrelationships among the 3 aggressiveness factors studied.

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  The present research examined a teacher’s guidance when introducing and establishing class norms, focusing on the teacher’s use of slogans.  A third-grade class was videotaped for 1 year.  Interactions involving the slogans “take good care of your life”, “take good care of your feelings”, and “don’t interfere with others’ studying” were analyzed.  Using those slogans, the teacher successfully structured lessons and settled disagreements between the students.  With this method, the teacher replaced his authority with a neutral relationship mediated by the slogans.  The teacher gradually showed the children how to use the slogans, which were viewed as signposts indicating the class’s goals.  Initially, the children applied the slogans by mimicking the teacher after he had used them to admonish other pupils ; later, the children used the slogans on their own.  The present findings suggest that a teacher could use such slogans as a tool for promoting children’s scholastic abilities and holistic personalities, and that a teacher can enable children to appropriate slogans for themselves.

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  The present study focused on the effects of active involvement in athletic and non-athletic extracurricular activities (ECA).  Junior high school students (N=894) completed a self-report questionnaire that aimed to discover (a) whether participation in extracurricular activities had a positive influence in each domain of school life and on psychosocial adjustment to school, and (b) whether the association between interpersonal domains and psychosocial adjustment differed, depending on the nature of students’ participation in extracurricular activities.  The results suggested that students with active involvement in extracurricular activities also had higher scores on each domain of school life and psychological adjustment, compared to students not involved in extracurricular activities, whereas the scores of students with low active involvement in extracurricular activities were not higher than non-participants’ scores.  It was also found that participants in athletic extracurricular activities had higher scores on antisocial tendencies.  Analyses of the association between interpersonal domains and psychosocial adjustment suggested that how student-peer and student-teacher relations influenced psychosocial adjustment differed depending on the condition of participation in extracurricular activities.  Students’ views concerning their class and student-other grader relations were not involved in this association. The discussion dealt with positive and negative aspects of extracurricular activities.

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  The present study investigated the relation between assumed competence based on undervaluing others and bullying.  High school students (N=1,062) completed a questionnaire measuring assumed competence and self-esteem, and asking whether they had been involved in bully/victim problems (physical bullying, verbal bullying, and indirect bullying).  The results indicated that the percentage of students who had experienced bullying in the high assumed-competence group (assumption type and omnipotence type) was higher than that in the low assumed-competence group (self-esteem type and atrophy type).  These results suggest that assumed competence is a key concept for understanding bullying.

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  The Over-Adaptation Tendency Scale is composed of internal (self-inhibitive personality traits) and external (other-directed behavioral adaptation strategies) characteristics.  So far, research on these 2 characteristics has studied them independently, but it is possible to hypothesize that internal aspects would invite specific (external) behavior.  The present study aimed (a) to investigate the relation between the internal and external aspects of the Over-Adaptation Scale in relation to childhood temperament and maternal attitudes toward childrearing, and (b) to construct a comprehensive model of over-adaptation and school adjustment.  Junior high school students (N=1,025) and their mothers completed a questionnaire.  The results suggest that the internal aspects affected by childhood temperament and maternal attitudes toward childrearing were related positively to external aspects.  Internal aspects were related negatively to school adjustment and positively to depressive symptoms, whereas the external aspects affected by internal aspects were related positively to school adjustment.  However, the external aspects showed no relation to depressive symptoms.  It is possible that over-adaptation supports social and cultural adjustment, but has no benefit for psychological adjustment or health.

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  The first purpose of the present study was to investigate whether Japanese learners understood the usage of the passive voice in English.  A preliminary study with 42 university students showed that the students did not have a sufficient understanding of the English passive voice.  Based on those results, a new instructional method for teaching the passive voice was prepared, based on psychological theory.  The new method was taught to 2 high school classes (n=68 students), while students in 2 other classes (n=67 students) were taught the passive voice by the method generally used in Japanese high school English classes.  The new method was different from the traditional one as follows : (a) students were forced to realize that their knowledge about the passive voice was insufficient, (b) differences between the structure of English and Japanese sentences were explained, and (c) the method showed the students what experts were thinking while solving problems about the passive voice, so that the students could learn how to solve those problems. All participants were trained for an hour, and then took 2 posttests.  On both tests, the 2 classes receiving the new instructional method performed better than the classes taught in the traditional way.

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  In order to examine the process of recovery after school disruption, the present study investigated a junior high school that had had various problems with student guidance.  After 3 years, the problems had finally dissipated.  The research questions regarding the recovery from school disruption included how teachers’ student guidance changed, and effects on students’ images of school life, their teachers, and students with problem behavior.  Teachers (n=2) were interviewed, and students (n=1,055) completed a questionnaire.  The results suggested that the teachers’ double standard of student guidance had decreased.  Also, the students’ images of school life, their teachers, and students with problem behavior improved during the time the school was recovering from the disruption.  As a result of examining student guidance in detail, it appeared that, in the recovery from the school disruption, the teachers had taken care not only of the students with problem behavior, but also of the other students.  These results suggest that in order to prevent and resolve school disruptions, it would be important to focus not only on those students who have problem behavior, but also on the students without problem behavior.

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  The present study investigated effects of an educational practice called “dialogic activity,” which aims at promoting learners’ understanding of concepts by interpreting the relation between a concept and the learners’ everyday experiences dialogically, following Bakhtin’s theory.  Participants in the study were fifth graders in elementary school (20 boys, 20 girls).  Some of the pupils were required to make presentations about task concepts, whereas the other pupils, after listening to the presentations, were asked to devise questions from the perspective of their everyday experiences.  Comparison of the presentations performed in between the lessons suggested the efficacy of dialogic activity : (a) the presenters came to interpret the concepts by adopting the standpoint of their everyday experiences, and (b) the dialogic attitudes of the presenters toward the audience questions changed from rejecting to responsive.

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  The present study investigated whether a preschool’s practice of growing vegetables would affect the school’s students’ awareness of biology, plants, and procedures of cultivation.  In Study 1, individual interviews were conducted with 18 six-year-olds at a school where the children regularly participated in raising vegetables, and 16 at another school where the children had little experience raising vegetables.  The children with experience growing vegetables tended to view vegetables as living things, based on biological reasons, and to know more about cultivation methods for those vegetables that they were familiar with than the children in the other school did.  When the children were asked about fruit that they had had no experience raising, no differences were found between the children at the 2 schools.  Study 2 found that the 6-year-old children (n=16) at the school that grew vegetables were more likely to see grass and trees as living things than were the 6-year-olds (n=19) at the other school.  Also, when asked about the effects of over-watering and lack of sunlight, the children who grew vegetables generated more biological inferences about edible plants, whereas no differences between the children at the 2 schools were found when the children were asked those same questions about non-edible plants.

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  In a modern society in which people need to acquire diverse bodies of knowledge actively and use them in innovative ways, cultivating creative people is regarded as one of the most important tasks of education.  However, liberal arts education in Japan has rarely provided students with opportunities to experience authentic creative activity.  The present study reports the development of an undergraduate course through which the students were able to collaborate with an artist in order to experience authentic artistic creative processes.  Participants, 11 undergraduates, were interviewed about 1 1/2 years after the end of the course, in order to evaluate the educational effects of the course.  The results of an analysis of the interviews suggested that the students had changed their perception of artistic creation, and that their motivation for creative activity had increased.  Moreover, some of the students had even made use of the course experience when they chose their career path or research topic.  The present findings suggest that experiencing authentic creative activities is meaningful not only for students in professional art training courses, but also for liberal arts undergraduates who are not planning to become artists.

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