Junior high school entrance examinations are a significant life event for children and their families in Japan. Some perceive junior high school entrance examinations as a challenge that fosters personal growth; others view them negatively, criticizing the excessive study burden and parental overinvolvement, which they view as inappropriate for children at that age. Although discussions of this topic have been extensive, few empirical psychological studies have been published. The present study retrospectively examined how adults interpret the impact of their experience of having taken junior high school entrance examinations. Participants (536 men and women, aged 25-39) completed an online survey conducted by a survey company, and their responses were analyzed. The results revealed both perceived positive impact, such as personal growth, improved friendships, and access to higher quality education, and negative impact, such as a lack of leisure time, adverse personality formation, and psychological distress. Respondents who had had better grades or outcomes reported stronger positive perceptions and weaker negative perceptions of the impact of the examination process. Moreover, participants with positive views tended to have higher educational achievement and socioeconomic status. Although the present study relies on self-reported retrospective data, it highlights some long-term psychological implications of the junior high school entrance examination process. The discussion recommends further contributions on this topic from the field of educational psychology.

  The present article reports the development of Japanese versions of the Mental Health Seeking Attitudes Scale (MHSAS) and the Mental Health Seeking Intention Scale (MHSIS), which assess attitudes and intentions toward seeking help for psychological problems. After the scales were translated following cross-cultural adaptation guides, they were completed online by 502 university students (360 women, 142 men; average age 21.4 years) and 542 general adults (278 women, 262 men; average age 42.6 years) recruited by two companies. Of those, 63% of the university students and 77% of the general adults participated in the follow-up survey four weeks later. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis confirmed a one-factor structure for both scales, consistent with the original versions; measurement invariance across groups was also confirmed. As hypothesized, both scales showed significant positive correlations with existing measures of help-seeking attitudes and intentions, and significant negative correlations with measures of public stigma and self-stigma. In addition, the MHSAS was positively associated with the MHSIS, and the MHSIS significantly predicted actual help-seeking behavior from professionals four weeks later. Test-retest reliability over a four-week interval was adequate. These findings suggest that the Japanese versions of the MHSAS and MHSIS are reliable and valid tools for assessing help-seeking attitudes and intentions in Japanese people.

  The present study focused on self-regulated learning, which involves reviewing and revising each lesson, in high school mathematics classes. The participants were 234 first-year high school students (10^th graders) in seven classes taught by the third author, a mathematics teacher. During the first semester, the students were encouraged to write about tasks that they should focus on during the review at the end of the class. In addition, their teacher emphasized the importance of lesson induction after solving problems, including taking notes on key points involved in solving the problems. However, observations indicated that many of the students' reflections dealt mainly with memorizing formulas and repeatedly solving problems. Although the reflections of some of the students included achieving a deeper understanding of the tasks that they should focus on during the review, those students' actual reviews did not do that. Therefore, in the second semester, a reflection sheet was introduced that included a table summarizing examples of task settings according to the types of difficulties students faced and examples of corresponding tasks. Also, the teacher provided examples of other students' reflections and reviews. Following that, the students' reflections were directed more toward understanding the reasoning behind formulas and problem solving, and a stronger connection was observed between the descriptions in their reflections and their subsequent reviews. The conclusion deals with the importance of incorporating self-regulated learning into classroom lessons.

  The goal of the present study was to analyze collaborative self-regulated learning by students in a multigrade class. Self-paced learning within a subject-matter unit was implemented by the teacher of a multigrade arithmetic class for elementary school third- and fourth-grade students (five at each grade level). The data used to examine the students' learning behavior were from videos of four class sessions and a questionnaire completed by the students on two occasions. The results suggested that, in a learning environment in which the teacher intentionally adopted indirect instructional strategies in order to encourage the students to advance their own learning processes, collaborative self-regulated learning emerged in which the students mutually coordinated their learning even during individual learning sessions. Characteristic forms of self-regulated learning behavior observed in the mixed-grade class included support-seeking behavior, in which the younger students relied on the older ones. The older students showed meta-co-regulatory behavior, monitoring their peers' self-regulation and the support that they had received, and then adjusting their own assistance accordingly. In the self-paced learning condition, individual differences were observed in the amount of time students spent on independent study and off-task activities. In addition, some students' learning was not retained despite their having engaged in self-regulated learning. This suggests that there may be a potential association with learning anxiety and motivation regulation strategies.