The present study examined why preschool children do not respond "I don't know" (DK) to unanswerable questions. The participants in the study were twenty-four 3-year-olds (10 boys, 14 girls), thirty-one 4-year-olds (12 boys, 19 girls), and thirty-five 5-year-olds (18 boys, 17 girls). They were asked answerable and unanswerable questions, which were presented in either a closed-ended or an open-ended format. They were then asked why they knew or did not know the answer, after which the experimenter confirmed their answer by telling them whether it had been correct. The results indicated that the 5-year-olds made fewer "don't know" responses to the closed-ended unanswerable questions than the 3- and 4-year-olds did, whereas no age-related differences were observed for the "don't know" responses to the open-ended unanswerable questions. Moreover, when the 5-year-olds were asked to explain why they knew the answers to the closed-ended unanswerable questions, they answered that they had guessed. The 5-year-olds also tended to change their answers or guess in response to the confirming questions. However, no age-related-differences were found in these responses. The present findings suggest that 2 different cognitive processes, "unaware of the possibility of guessing" and "aware of the possibility of guessing," may explain why children do not answer that they do not know.

  The structure of beliefs about effort was investigated with the goal of developing a scale for assessing individual differences in beliefs that would enable an examination of whether beliefs about effort were related to goal-pursuit behavior. The participants in the present study were college students. The results of Studies 1 and 2 suggested that beliefs about effort could be divided into the following categories: importance/necessity, sense of cost, symbol of low talent, emphasis on efficiency, environmental dependence, duty/nurture, and external standards. Moreover, the results of Studies 2, 3, and 4 confirmed that the Beliefs About Effort Scale developed in the present study had sufficient reliability, as assessed by internal consistency and temporal stability, and adequate validity, as assessed by structural and external evidence. Furthermore, the results of Study 4 suggested that the way that individuals pursue difficult goals may depend on their beliefs about effort, that is, beliefs about effort defined their behavior. The Beliefs About Effort Scale may be useful in the examination of relationships between effort and various behaviors, including learning behavior.

  In the present study, students' perception of their post-lecture note-making strategies and changes in their strategies during a course, and the relations between qualitative characteristics of the students' post-lecture notes and the students' performance on examinations, were investigated. The participants were university students: Study 1, N=171; Study 2, N=114; and Study 3, N=45. The results of Study 1, which was conducted in a lecture course, suggested that the amount of notes written and the frequency of the use of figures predicted the students' test performance, and that the students' perception of the utility and cost of making post-lecture notes differed, depending on whether the notes could be referred to during examinations. The students participating in Study 2 prepared post-lecture notes twice during the exercise course. Their performance on fact problems suggested that the amount of writing and the level of organization of the notes had a positive effect, whereas copying a summary had a negative effect. The level of organization and the copying of summaries also predicted the students' performance on problems requiring application of the material and on tasks requiring explanation. The change in the perception of the post-lecture notes was statistically significant, although the size of the effect was small. In Study 3, the lecturer explicitly explained characteristics of effective post-lecture notes. The degree of organization in the post-lecture notes of the participants in Study 3 predicted their test scores on problems requiring application of the material; their perception of strategies also showed a significant increase.

  Kindergarten children form peer relationships ranging from solitary to pairs to groups. However, during that process, some of them become lonely children or form a dyad that is too close. Both of those inhibit the children from expanding their peer relationships. The present study investigated teachers' practical knowledge of how to encourage changes in children's peer relationships. In interviews, 30 kindergarten teachers were presented with 3 hypothetical cases: a lonely child, children in a dyad that was considered to be too close, and a case combining both a lonely child and a too-close dyad. When the teachers' narrative replies were analyzed using grounded theory, 16 categories, involving 6 intervention processes, emerged. Integrating the 16 categories resulted in a hypothetical model of teachers' practical knowledge. The model suggests that teachers encourage changes in children's peer relationships with a 5-step intervention, in order to develop children's play. The discussion compares the present results with the results of previous studies of social skill training for children and the practical study of early childhood education, and emphasizes the professionalism of kindergarten teachers for developing children's peer relationships, as well as limitations of the present study.

  The present study examined effects on student teachers' learning of a course aimed at cultivating a particular view of sexuality education instruction, using the jigsaw method (a method of organizing classroom activity that makes students dependent on each other to succeed). A questionnaire was completed before and after the course (July 2018, July 2019) by 282 teacher training students at a private university in the Tokyo metropolitan area. In order to examine changes in the students' views of sexuality education instruction, (a) images of sexuality, (b) reasons for sexuality education, and (c) specific changes in the students after the sexuality education course were analyzed using KH Coder. The results indicated that the co-occurrence of words in the questionnaire, such as embarrassed, different, knowledge, adult, and gender, changed from before to after the class, in that the words were used in a different context. These results suggest that the student teachers' perceptions of sexuality and sexuality education had changed, and that their perception had shifted from being learners to being instructors. In addition, it appears that the students had learned with their peers as a result of the use of the collaborative jigsaw method. This may mean that, although the members of the jigsaw groups may not have understood the course content individually, they had tried to understand it through dialogue with others in their group. This, in turn, suggests that the students may not have constructed what they learned about sexuality only intellectually, but rather that they constructed the meaning performatively through the dialogue with others that is intrinsic to the jigsaw method.

  The viewpoint of the present study is that gratitude is a combination of interpersonal gratitude, that is, gratitude to people, and non-interpersonal gratitude, that is, gratitude to objects. The participants were 183 fifth and sixth graders, of whom 87 were assigned to an interpersonal gratitude group and 96 to a non-interpersonal gratitude group. During a 3-week period, the children wrote notes of gratitude and read them aloud. At pre-, post, and a 3-month follow-up, they completed self-report instruments with questions about their rumination, optimism, pessimism, and stress responses. The results revealed a significant increase in the gratitude and optimism scores of the students in the interpersonal gratitude group. A significant increase in gratitude scores and a significant decrease in stress response scores was shown by the students in the non-interpersonal gratitude group. Based on these results, issues for future research are discussed.

  The objectives of the present study included implementing a moral education program aimed at promoting role-taking ability in delinquents at a juvenile training school and then examining the effectiveness of the program. Out of an initial group of 20 adolescent boys, the 9 who participated in the entire program (ages 15 to 19 years) were assessed 3 times: before, during, and after the intervention. Developmental progress was found in 5 of those participants: they moved up 1 stage in their role-acquisition ability, and achieved higher scores on a rating scale of adaptive behavior at juvenile training schools. The other 4 participants did not display developmental progress in their role-taking ability, and their scores on the rating scale did not show any meaningful change. Focusing on the juveniles who had not changed when participating in the moral education program, an additional objective of the present study was to examine the relationship between intra-individual factors and the juveniles' reported satisfaction with the program. The results indicated that the number of prior delinquencies was higher for juveniles who had not benefitted from the program than for those who had. Interviews conducted with instructors at the training school confirmed that relationships within the group and personality traits of the participants were associated with the program's effectiveness.