The purpose of this study is to clearify the characteristics of gifted children by basic experimental methods.
The Japanese edition of WISC was administered to children in an elementary school in Tokyo, and those who have IQ higher than 130. were selected. They were 25 in number or 2.4 per cent to the total.
Twenty five children with normal intelligence were also selected to make a control group.
Questionnaires and tests were administered to the subjects. And a survey was done with to their parents and teachers.
The comparison was made in terms of characteristics listed below and the results were: 1) Gifted children showed superiority on items with asterisk.(****indicates that the difference between gifted and normal children is significant at 0.1 per cent level, ***1 per cent level, *20 per cent level.) 2) Normal children showed superiority on items with asterisk in parentheses.
1. Intellectual characteristics on WISC scores.
2. Characteristics in physical and motor development:
i) Physical development-height, weight, and girth of chest.
ii) Motor skill-grasping power (left hand, and right hand*), tapping speed (left hand (****) and right hand), and aiming***.
3. Characteristics in developmental history:
i) Weight at the birth***.
ii) Age of cutting the first tooth.
iii) Age of beginning of speech. iv) Age of beginning of walking.
v) Age of beginning of use of letter***
(reading and writing)
vi) Amount of letters learned in pre-school age*.(letters able to read and letters able to write)
4. Characteristics in interests, play and extracurricular activities:
i) Special lessons besides school***.
ii) Reading.(favorite books, number of books read per week)
iii) Play.
5. Characteristics in learning activity.
i) Study hours at home (per week)(*)
ii) Preference among school subjects.
iii) School attendance.
6. Characteristics in school grade.

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The authors have found in a previous study that the difficulty in shifting discrimination learning without added instruction, increased and then decreased along with the number of reinforcements during prior learning. Although comparisons of some pairs of groups differing in the number of reinforcements showed statistically significant differences, an overall group difference failed to reach the usual standards of significance.
The present experiment was designed to confirm the previous findings with more distributed number of reinforced trials in prior discrimination and with different subjects and settings. Subjects aged 15 to 19 were trained on a simple two-choice size discrimination problem with another stimulus dimension of color being 50% reinforced. Five groups were differentiated with respect to learning criteria of three, five, 10 successive correct responses, 10 such responses plus 20 correct responses and the same 10 responses plus 40 correct responses respectively.
When the criterion was met, the subject was shifted without interruption to color discrimination with the same stimulus setting and without added instruction. The learning criterion in color discrimination was 10 successive correct responses irrespective of group differentials. Moreover, a control group was run with the same criterion without taking size discrimination. Number of subjects per group was 10 and groups were roughly equated with respect to age, sex and intelligence.
The results indicated that negative transfer in color discrimination appeared until the criterion in prior learning reached five successive correct responses, and that positive transfer appeared, beyond this point, with the increase of reinforced trials during the period of size discrimination (see Table 4 and Fig. 1). Both negative and positive effects were statistically significant. Thus, the previous study was confirmed.
It was also found that, when five successive correct responses had been attained, the subject made almost no errors beyond this point (see Table 3). It should be noted that this point was a critical inflection point from negative to positive transfer. The fact suggests that the subject overlearns the size problem as he is trained over this critical point and he begins to learn the stimulus situation as a whole. In other words, he begins to have a learning set or a set in discrimination and this makes a shift easier in discrimination. Before the inflection point, the subject is responding to a specific stimulus and is learning to choose a particular reinforced stimulus. Thus negative transfer is expected. It should be noticed that previous studies by other authors on this issue have dealt with the data only after the critical point, i. e. overlearning.

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In this study, the readiness for the study of arithmetics, especially for the multiplication facts is investigated. There is a great difference between the effect of teaching before a child become mentally ready for the arithmetic and the effect of teaching after the readiness is nearly achieved. Therefore, curriculum should be made along with the psychological growth of children. Children may not be willing to meet each unit in the course of study unless they are not mentally ready for it.
1) Purpose: This study has two purposes: the first is to decide the most adequate time for the study of the multiplication facts in accordance with the physical and psychological growth. The second is to analyse the factors related to the arithmetic readiness.
2) Method: The method of this study consists of comparative experiments and the subjects are the second and third grade children of eight elementary schools in Tokyo City and in Gifu Prefecture. A thousand and forty-six subjects in total were divided into four homogeneous groups in respect to intelligence and knowledge in primary arithmetics. Only difference among them is the time of beginning of the experiments. Group I began from the second term of the second grade (September), Group II, from the third term of the second grade (January), Group III, from the first term of the third grade (April), and Group IV, from the first term of the third grade (June). These group were taught by the same method, on the same materials by 22 teachers for each group. Then the First Foundation Test, The Second Foundation Test, Pretest, Final Test and Retention Test were given in the following order.(Fig. I) In order to analyse other factors which may give effect to arithmetical readiness, the investigator administered the New Tanaka Intelligence Test B, Guess-Who-Test, Self-Diagnosis-Test, Preference-Test, Memory-Abilities-Test, Home-Environment-Test and so forth.
To establish a criterion for adequate mastery of the multiplication facts learning, the standard of the Committee of Seven on Grade Placement of Arithmetic topics in U. S. A., was adopted. The standard is “Adequate mastery means the degree of mastery which enables more than 80% of children to pass the retention test which is administered after six weeks.”
3) Results: Mental age for the multiplication facts learning which enables three-fourths of the children to reach 80 percent mastery is found to be eight years and one months (the 2nd term of the 2nd grade). This age is considered as the most adequate level at which teaching of multiplication facts can be begun. It is recommended, therefore, Japanese children can be taught six months earlier than as they are with the present curriculum.
The factors which are relevant to the arithmetic readiness are as follow:
1) The intelligence to be needed for arithmetic learning.
2) The speed of reaction (response)
3) The function of vision or visual organ.
4) The function of hearing or auditory organ.
5) The home environment.
6) The emotional adjustment.
7) The patience tendency.
8) The faculty of remembering (memory)
9) Interest in arithmetic learning
10) Experience of arithmetic learning (arithmetic readiness)

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This study aims at pursuing the change resulted from repeated testing given to the subjects, Junior High School pupils, either by their teacher or nonteacher, Who is an instructor from the outside.
The experiments are carried Out in the following four conditions.
(1) The first test is given by the teacher and the second one by an instructor from the outside.
(2) The first test is given by the instructor from the outside and the second one by the teacher.
(3) Both the first and the second tests are given by the teacher.
(4) Both the first and the second tests are given by the instructor from the outside.
The subjects are the boys and girls of the first grade Junior High School (Table 2) and the test used. is the Honesty test. and the results is considered to be affected neither by the repetition are of the test nor by the influence of memory.
Results:
The following findings were revealed through this investigation:
(1) As the first test carried out by the teacher, small number of subjects committed false behaviors, only whereas a great number of false behaviors occurred in the testing done by the instructor from the outside.
(2) However, it has been clear through the second administration of test that the teacher does not always give stronger inhibitory influence upon the subjects than by the instructor from the outside. In the case of the second condition, the amount of false behaviors done by the teacher is bigger than that by the instrcutor from the outside.
(3) Thus it seems that the experience of the subjects in the previous test affects the result of the next test to a great extent. However, the amount of the occurrence of false behaviors is small when both the first test and the second test are given by the same person, either the teacher or the instructor from the outside, that is in the case of the third and fourth condition.
As to the next step of our research, subjects should be also given other tests and should be analysed in terms of their age. Furthermore, the case in which the instructor from the outside would be more inhibitory towards the subjects than the teacher should be investigated.

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As the first step of educational psychological study of “teaching vocation” as a subject matter of secondary school, three fundamental skills of woodworks such as sawing, planeing and hole-making by chisel were selected.
Subjects: Subjects were 61 boys of 8th grade randomly selected from different three secondary. schools. Each represented districts of, industry, commerce and residence, and agriculture. To avoid measuring errors, the same instructions manual was used.
The details of wood-works: (1) Sawing: to make one-inch cubes as many as possible out of a long bar which section is one inch square for 15 minutes.(2) Planeing: to make a plane board of 2.8×8×0.4inches for 60 minutes.(3) Hole-making by chisel: to make a 0.5 inch square holes as many as possible on a plane board for 40 minutes.
Scales for evaluation: to. quantity qualities of each product of children, different 2-point-scales for evaluation (passed or failed) were made. The full score on each scales were 7 points for sawing, 22 for planeing and 21 for hole-making by chisel.
The correlations: The following 5 kinds of scores were correlated.
(1) quality of sawing (mean of scores)
(2) quantity of sawing (number of products)
(3) planeing (scores)
(4) quality of hole-making (mean of scores)
(5) quantity of hole-making (number of products)
Scores of two aptitude tests, mechanical aptitude test, and vocational aptitude test made by a ministry of labour were also correlated. It resulted that there was no correlation among the scores except one between quantity of hole-making, both of which contain the same factor of speed.

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[in Japanese]

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