The study involved a practice of e-mail counseling for eleven students of "non-attendance at school", conducted from December 2000 to December 2001 at the education center. As of December 2001, the condition of non-attendance at school of almost all students improved. In order to investigate roles of e-mail counseling, 1) the e-mail messages sent by students were analyzed, 2) parents of students who participated in e-mail counseling were asked about the roles played by e-mail counseling for their students and families, and 3) counselors who participated in this practice were interviewed regarding the effectiveness of e-mail counseling. The result of content analysis of the e-mail messages by the students showed that there were more "school and study related" and "friend related" words in the e-mails of students whose improvement of condition of non-attendance was high, than in those of students whose improvement was low. There were more of such words in the e-mails which students sent in the latter half of the period than in former half. The results of questionnaires given to the parents and the interviews to the counselors indicated that communication of the students both at home and with other using the computers increased and that they began to explore interests with the Internet.

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This paper describes a proposal for a new method to assess communication among learners in the CSCL. The method proposed in this paper is to visualize discussions by focusing on the relationship between topic keywords and each learner using Correspondence Analysis. In this paper, the authors examine validity and possibility of the proposed method, through an experimental study in a cross-cultural CSCL program. The correspondence map made by the analysis could represent topic parts and learners' commitment in the learning community, according to interviews with Japanese and foreign learners. Also the map has a potentiality to help learners engage in active discussions by providing reflection of their own interest or that of others. From another interview with a Japanese teacher, It has been shown that the map has the effect to support teachers and moderators to evaluate and facilitate the learners' discussions.

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We examined the effect of working memory load on eyeblink activity, which is an index of mental activity, by manipulating working memory load using the Japanese edition of the Reading Span Test (RST). Fifteen healthy graduate and undergraduate students participated in the study. Results indicated the following, (1) The eyeblink rate while recalling 2 low load sentences and 5 very high load sentences was significantly higher than the eyeblink rate after completing recall. (2) There was no significant difference in the eyeblink rate between high and low load sentences during recall. However, the eyeblink rate after recalling 3 or 4 sentences was significantly higher than that after recalling 2 sentences. These findings suggest that a decrease in processing resources of working memory influences eyeblink activity. (3) The eyeblink rate while reading aloud with attention focused externally was significantly lower than the eyeblink while recalling and after recalling with attention focused inwardly. (4) The eyeblink rate peak occurred after receiving recall instructions, or immediately after starting recall. This suggests that processing of stimuli was completed and conscious processing using cognitive effort was performed.

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Learning through experience is a key for successful environmental education. Nature watching, in which learners are expected to observe interesting objects such as flowers, animals, insects, trees or flowers while walking in the forest, is becoming more and more popular, and in most cases, learners just follow their lecturer and walk along a given course during nature watching. However, this type of learning may not promote spontaneous activities of learners to find something interesting in nature by themselves. Therefore, we developed a system for supporting environmental education using GPS (Global Positioning System) and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), which provides learners with location-based information on nature. While learners explore the forest with the developed system, they are expected to come to a specific point where some location-based information is shown on the display of PDA. As a result of two field tests, we find that almost all participants enjoyed themselves.

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The purpose of this study was to demonstrate a method of converting qualitative data into quantitative data to obtain an objective index. Evaluation of clients in educational and clinical settings is often written in free-format text. However, based on such qualitative data difficulty arises in judging common perspectives used by different evaluators. This paper presented a procedure of using qualitative data quantitatively to obtain an objective index from such data. Specifically, using morphological analysis and the tf-idf method, text data were converted into numerical data based on frequency of word appearance in the text on four domains in vocational rehabilitation (i. e., physical, mental, social, and vocational). The values were further analyzed with hierarchical cluster analysis. The analysis distinguished words appearing only in one of the domains (3 clusters) from those appearing across the domains. The study suggested a possibility that these words might be used as objective indices for client evaluation. The paper discusses issues such as necessity of developing exclusion rules of unsuitable words.

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This study aims at examining what kind of indexes are applicable to grasp learners' condition of participation or tendency of learners' statement on BBS. Twelve indexes for grasping learners' condition of participation, and three indexes for grasping tendency of learners' statement are calculated automatically with a system we developed and displayed on the web browser. We calculated these indexes based on a log data of an e-learning class, and investigated their validity through questionnaire and interview. The result shows that the diversity of posted words is relatively appropriate to grasp learners' condition of participation, because it had strong correlation with assessment of learners' condition of participation by estimators who grasp the communication on BBS well. It is also implied that indexes of tendency of learners' statement are available to take a general view of discussion on BBS.

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This study aims to consider the development of a female student teacher's images on educational practices based on her communication with teachers and colleagues. The authors described her practice teaching through fieldwork. The authors proposed that development of her images on educational practices based on her communication with others could be shown as two figures. One is the accumulation-refinement process about development of a student teacher's image on teachers. It expresses his/her action of continuous communication with a mentor and refining his/her image on teachers. The other is confliction-integration process about a student teacher's image on teaching. It explains his/her action of communicating with not only a mentor but also other teachers who have alternative views of teaching, feeling confused about what teaching should be and making an integrated image on teaching after the time of deliberation.

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