Although company employees in Japan are increasingly expected to learn themselves and build their career actively, research on adult learning for career development has attracted little attention. This study, using a hierarchical linear model, explores the effects of organizational settings and job attitudes such as risk-taking and flexibility for career development. A survey was conducted among 1,214 employees in 17 firms and addressed key issues that their job attitudes, flexibility and risk-taking are important for their career development. The data reveal that clarification of the job content raises the level of risk-taking and thus encourages their career development, while workplace support such as sharing knowledge and skills reduces the level of them. These findings indicate that the former helps individuals with a high risk-taking propensity to build their careers, whereas the latter is required for those having less risk-taking propensity.

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It is important to develop learning environment for improving essay writing skill because demand of ability of essay writing is increasing. We focused on reading for problematizing in essay writing to enable learners to improve the essay writing skill. Taking into account studies in psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience which imply contribution of intuitive and affective thought in problem finding in essay writing, it should be benefitial for learners to learn under learning environment for essay writing which elicits learners' intuitive and affective thought. We developed a web application called EMU (Emotional and Motivational Underliner), which enables learners to add annotations on arbitrary strings with affective tagging and to leave comments on the annotations added by other learners. We examined the influence of the affective tagging on the EMU. The results suggested that the affective tagging elicited learners' reading for problematizing and essay writing based on issues that the learners found.

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This paper focuses on communication between students and their supervisors concerning students' research ideas. Throughout the cognitive apprenticeship starting with those communications, students learn their supervisors' acuity of vision (e.g. good judgment about what is important, his/her ability to find the problem domain which will become important in the future), attitude as a researcher, and exacting evaluation criteria. For students, as research novices, refining their own vague research-concern to a research idea is a hard task. It is necessary for the novices to change their vague interests into concrete ones, in order to express their interests in some way to their supervisors. We consider how we can construct a support method to formulate a research idea in terms of the communications and the concretizing. In particular, we investigate how students should express their own research-concern, how we should show the key concepts for students' expressions, and what key concepts are suitable for the expression-process, through experiments and a concept analysis based on the ontology engineering approach. In this paper, we provide the procedure to construct an external representation of a research-concern and the pre-editing method we developed, and discuss analyzable cases and the un-analyzable case.

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UPO-NET project is an attempt to delivery of sharable digital learning content for Japanese higher educational institutions. This project has a plan to get usage fee from institutions. Therefore the system has an issue with contents utilization management. In addition, there are issues posed by contents distribution to many institutions. This paper describes the system for resolving these issues.

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With the progress of the information and communication technology, many schools have introduced the learning activity with computers recently. Some of the schools have also started to use GUI programming environment such as Squeak eToys. In this learning activity, it is very difficult for teachers to understand the learning process because they have to look into the details of computer screens but they have a lot of tasks to be done during this learning activity. In this paper, we present a system to support teachers to understand the learning process by extracting characteristic screen images using the simple moving average. This system has been applied to a workshop and the result shows that the extracted screen images are useful enough to support teachers.

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In high school education, the application of historical causal relationships to problem solving is considered important, yet a learning method of verifiable effectivity has not been produced. In this study: 1) a staged learning method for identifying causal relationships within modern societal problems via references to historical causations is designed, 2) a competitive card game for high-schoolers versed in world history, where players construct causations in the modern age by using historical causations, was developed, and 3) the effectivity of this device was tested. As a result, the materials' effectiveness on improving both the ability to associate past and current events with similar characteristics and the ability to analyze causations in modern problems by referencing historical problems, was evidenced.

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We designed and practiced 26 hours programming lessons for 4th graders using Scratch. All students who participated in the class created varieties of works with programming commands for controlling objects and repeating. More than 80% of them used commands for discriminant procedure of key inputs and conditional branching. Through the practice, we found this Scratch based lessons at elementary school suited to the introduction for programming education.

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This research investigated the process of interdisciplinary research exchanges by doctoral students who study humanities. The purpose of this research is to elucidate what motivated them to participate in interdisciplinary research exchanges, what they learned from these experiences, and how they changed their attitudes through these experiences. In this research, a hypothetical model was set up by analyzing the interview data, and this model was verified by quantitative data. As a result, an interdisciplinary personal network motivated them to participate in these experiences. And they learned interdisciplinary exchange strategies to lead to success from their failures. Therefore, it can be said that these experiences need time and some experiences to take effect.

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We conducted a class focused on experience-based network communication morals. Students discussed issues with regard to their actual experiences in a school LAN chat session during first part of the class. After the discussion, students took part in another LAN session. The control group did not take part in an initial chat, but instead simply read the logs of the chat-experience group. In their discussion, the control group raised less positive points than the chat-experience group, but they found more issues about network communication. However, the group who took part in the initial chat used more desirable and less problematic conversation compared with the control group both at the end of the class, and in a delay test. Although the control group could find more issues in reading the chat logs, they were unable to translate this into improvements in actual chat. Hence, we found that actual initial chat experience was advantageous.

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In this paper, we conducted an educational practice in order to improve the quality of academic essays written by undergraduate students with an online academic writing support system. The system was designed to help students to be aware of the significance of argumentation by its anchored comment function. The result of the practice indicated that during the cooperative revision activity, the students referred to the argument of their first draft by using the anchored comment function. Practical guidelines to improve the quality of academic essays through mutual comment activity were suggested.

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In 2002, Maekawa reported the identification of categories of paralinguistic information by subjects. Using Maekawa' s methods, Ariga extracted categories of paralinguistic information from teachers' speech during their teaching behaviors (2008). However, whereas both of the above studies used recordings of spoken examples of paralinguistic categories, speech is continuous in spoken communications. In the present study, subjects were divided into three groups under different conditions and asked to listen for categories of paralinguistic information in continuous speech to determine how such information is recognized by subjects. This revealed clear differences in the recognition of categories of paralinguistic information among the three groups.

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The research explored what images about "making-artifacts" have been widespread in the society by conducting an online social survey for adults, based on an open-ended questionnaire item. The survey included administration of a scale measuring awareness of "making-artifacts, and relationships between the extracted images about and awareness of "making-artifacts" were analyzed. The analysis results extracted image categories related to industries and those not related to them. The former categories consisted of "professional technologies," "types, fields, organizations," and "goods, products." The later categories consisted of "tradition" and "mind, culture." Moreover, the results found that respondents having the images not related to industries occupied about a half of the whole respondents, and there was a difference on distributions of these images between generations. Furthermore, it was suggested that the awareness of "making-artifacts" was generally positive, and respondents having the images not related to industries had more positive awareness of "making-artifacts" related to individuals' daily life than those having images related to industries.

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