The reliability and validity of the Japanese version developed by the present authors of the Parental Gatekeeping Scale (Puhlman & Pasley, 2017) was examined. Mothers (N=685) of children attending public and private preschools and kindergartens in Ibaraki Prefecture completed the Parental Gatekeeping Scale and other instruments that were used to evaluate the validity of the scale, including a marital satisfaction scale, a scale measuring fathers' involvement with and interest in child-rearing, and a scale on which each mother rated her children's attitudes toward their father. Useable responses were obtained from 313 of the mothers (45.7%). Exploratory factor analyses of the responses revealed 3 factors: "encouragement", "control", and "discouragement". Cronbach's α for each factor demonstrated that the Japanese scale had appropriate internal consistency. The examination of the validity of the scale indicated that "encouragement" was correlated positively with the mothers' reports of their marital satisfaction, the father's involvement with their children, and their children's attitudes toward their father. "Control" was correlated positively with the mothers' reports of the father's involvement with their children and their children's attitudes toward their father. On the other hand, "discouragement" was correlated negatively with the mothers' reports of their marital satisfaction, the father's involvement with their children, and their children's attitudes toward their father. These results demonstrate the concurrent validity of the Japanese version of the Parental Gatekeeping Scale.

  The present study focused on students seeking academic help from their teachers, examining characteristics of students who assumed competence based on their undervaluing of others, and investigated how students' assumed competence affected their seeking academic help from their teachers. Although previous studies reported that the greater was students' tendency to undervalue others, the more likely they were to criticize their teachers' methods, no association has been reported between assumed competence and seeking academic help from teachers. The present study hypothesized that other factors such as rejection sensitivity and loneliness might be modulating the relation between students' assumed competence and their seeking academic help from their teachers. The participants in the study, 173 high school students, completed the following scales: Assumed Competence, Academic Help-Seeking, Interpersonal Sensitivity, and Interpersonal Alienation. The results suggested that the students with high scores on assumed competence and rejection sensitivity were characterized by avoidance of academic help-seeking, whereas the students with low rejection sensitivity scores reported seeking help from their teachers. Feelings of loneliness modulated the relationship between assumed competence and academic help-seeking. It is possible that feelings of loneliness lead to seeking academic help from teachers, instead of other communication.

  In Japan, an integrated compulsory education system was implemented in response to difficulties in school adjustment associated with students' transition from elementary to junior high school. Aspects needing further examination include relationships between the extent of environmental change from before to after the transition to students' sense of adjustment to school, and longitudinal effects of teachers and parents on students' adjustment to school during this transition. The present article reports a longitudinal survey of 121 students (54 boys, 67 girls) from 1 unified primary-secondary school and 173 students (104 boys, 69 girls) from regular elementary and junior high schools. Students completed questionnaires at the end of the sixth grade and 3 times during the following school year, i.e., at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. Analysis of the data revealed no significant differences in the trajectory of school enjoyment between the 2 types of school transitions, although the extent of environmental change was less during the transition in the unified primary-secondary school than in the change from regular elementary schools to regular junior highs. The mean of the change in school enjoyment tended toward slightly negative; the variance of the change was significant. The distribution of the change in school enjoyment revealed that only a few of the students markedly increased or decreased their school enjoyment. A longitudinal reciprocal influence was found between the teacher-student relationships and school enjoyment during the first year of junior high school. No longitudinal effect of the parent-child relationships was found to be significant.

  Item response theory (IRT) models have been proposed for continuous observed variables, such as response time and confidence in responses. The present paper extends Noel & Dauvier's (2007) model, according to which continuous responses were modeled with a beta distribution, and proposes a new item response theory model in which the estimation method for item parameters uses an EM algorithm from which asymptotic standard errors (SEs) are derived. The possibility of a linear transformation of parameters is also discussed. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated both in a simulation study and when applied to data from an actual math achievement test. The simulation revealed that the root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) between the estimates and the true values were about 0.1, and that the proposed method resulted in a more stable result than Noel & Dauvier's (2007) method, even with data from a test with a small number of items. Moreover, the application of the proposed method to actual data with a large number of observed categories, although not originally assumed to be continuous variables, yielded relatively small SEs of the item parameters and showed that the ability estimates were highly correlated with the estimates from a graded response model (GRM).

  The present study examined the processes and effects of teachers' praise on their students' enjoyment of school and teachers' engagement in their work. The research was done with 4 teachers (2 men, 2 women) at 1 junior high school. The duration of baseline differed across teachers. The intervention at the end of the baseline period consisted of a lecture given to the teachers regarding the nature of praise and how to deliver praise to their students, plus training in self-recording. After that, the teachers recorded the praise that they gave to their students during 1 class period daily for 4 weeks. The teachers completed questionnaires once a week from the beginning of the baseline period to the end of the intervention. In addition, each teacher participated in a 30-minute semi-structured interview. Their students (N=267: 96 in 7th grade, 111 in 8th grade, and 60 in 9th grade) completed questionnaires at the beginning and end of the intervention period. The results suggested that the students' enjoyment of school increased in classes in which teachers' use of praise increased. Analysis of the data from the teachers suggested that their work engagement increased with an increase in their use of praise. Experiencing the effects of using praise was directly related to teachers' increased work engagement and to changes in the teachers' perception of their students. The teachers' praise for the students appeared to contribute to increased adjustment to school for both the students and the teachers. The discussion deals with the importance of interaction and correspondence between the teachers' praise and the students' experience of being praised.

  Recent publications have proposed various hypotheses as to why learning by teaching is effective. The present paper classifies those theories on the basis of their hypothesized underlying mental processes into the following 5 categories: (a) a knowledge-construction hypothesis that proposes that preparing to teach and teaching stimulate knowledge-building and generative processing, thereby fostering learning, (b) a motivation hypothesis that proposes that acting as a teacher enhances motivation to process learning material in a knowledge-constructive manner, (c) an explanation-generation hypothesis that proposes that preparing to explain and explaining encourage knowledge construction, (d) a metacognition hypothesis that proposes that providing instructional explanations and interacting with students promote knowledge construction through the enhancement of metacognitive monitoring, and (e) a retrieval-practice hypothesis that proposes that the retrieval practice inherent in the provision of instructional explanations increases learning. The present examination of the results of prior research suggests that some evidence favors the knowledge-construction and metacognition hypotheses, whereas evidence relating to the other 3 hypotheses is highly limited or mixed. Finally, future directions for research are discussed.