The purpose of this study is to investigate the concept of the learners' factor, learning environment, and learning outcomes in the third-and fourth-year students' seminar, and then consider the relationships among these concepts. In this study, we conducted a survey of 13 universities using a questionnaire form and rating scale for 387 students. Because the multilevel data collected in this study includes individual and seminar levels, we divided the 304 students' data into "Within model" and "Between model" categories and calculated the correlation coefficients. The results of the analysis indicate that the following three variables correlate positively with the sense of community, growth in the skills of problem solving and personal relationship development, and satisfaction in seminar levels: (1) students' expectations for the learning environment as the reason for attending the seminar; (2) their motivation for aspiring to learn in cooperation with others; and (3) the teacher's instructional techniques.

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This study proposes an ePortfolio system encouraging students to learn from others. The system (1) provides structured individual ePortfolios and hyperlinks that enable students to quickly locate useful information created by others in various ways, (2) features user-friendly, intelligent search capabilities making it easy to search for keywords and identify other bright students (based on past reports, test scores, peer assessment, and so on), and (3) supports an array of assessment techniques at all levels-tests, peer assessments, self assessments, instructor-designated best practices, ability to input comments from other students, hyperlinks-that not only encourage students to reflect upon their own learning but can be used to quickly identify the best students who consistently do excellent work. Actual trial use of the system demonstrates that Samurai-folio does indeed promote learning from others, and supports sustainability of learning and deeper robust acquisition of knowledge; not superficial learning based on memorization.

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This study was aimed at developing and applying a method for quantifying the development of "knowledge building community" based on the epistemology of learning as a process of participating in a certain community. To do so, we applied our methods for comparing the differences of their participating process between the two set of classrooms, one of an expertise teacher of collaborative learning and the other of a first-time teacher. The findings supported the view that (1) only in the expertise teacher's class their pupils became members of "knowledge building community" progressively and their frequency of their actions promoting their collaborative talk increased, (2) the indices used in this study shifted differently between the two set of classrooms and increased only in the expertise teacher's class, and (3) the validity of our method was verified. And in the expertise teacher's class, their pupils were offered they offered their pupils more opportunities for learning to learn collaboratively by creating the contingency between their pupils' utterances promoting their collaborative talk. Finally, the limitations and future directions were discussed.

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between the effectiveness of learning and Event Related Potential (ERP for short) measured from electroencephalograms. The effectiveness of learning is defined and a model explaining the effectiveness is proposed. The parameters included in the model are determined by the variables concerned with averaged ERP using a data selection method.

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Item Relational Structure (IRS) analysis and fuzzy graphing are known as popular methods to express relations among test items. These methods can estimate the item structure from test data through easy calculation. However, when two items are affected strongly by the latent ability variable, relations can be detected incorrectly because of the relation through the latent variable. This paper introduces Item Latent Structure (ILS) analysis, which uses the Latent Conditional Independence (LCI) test, to assess the conditional independence between two items given a latent variable. After simulation and application to actual data, results demonstrate that ILS analysis can detect conditional independence correctly given a latent ability variable.

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The student evaluation system of teaching would be fruitful when the result caused enhancement of education. We developed the effective feedback system of the student evaluation result to the faculties. It indicates the information for further improvement of their teaching by using data and text mining such as Basic Statistics, Classification and Regression Trees for student satisfaction, and Association Rules for their evaluations. The opinion survey conducted in the faculties who used the effective feedback system showed the followings: (1) generally speaking, the users answered the system is useful for class improvement. (2) The function employing the association rule for free writing was considered an effective tool for more improvement of education, but the binary tree analysis, on the other hand, did not had the high appraisal. (3) Because the evaluation was relatively low in the questions of easy-to-read, easy-to-understand, etc., it is necessary to modify the interface.

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The current systems do not promote active reflection by the students because learning and assessment are separated, which makes it hard for students to understand their learning process, and e-portfolios are not reused easily. To overcome these problems so that e-portfolios can better support learning and assessment, we developed a framework, which is defined as an accumulation grammar, to gather the evidence needed for learning and assessment using e-portfolios for every meaningful unit with a formal language. We then developed a system based on the accumulation grammar. Introducing the grammar should lead to a system that can manage e-portfolios flexibly, thereby keeping the accumulation structure at a desirable level by treating parse trees corresponding to the subset of the e-portfolios in accordance with the rules of the accumulation grammar. The use of this RefLASS system should lead to better support for unifying learning and assessment, understanding the learning process, and reusing e-portfolios, which should result in more reflection.

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Resolving the issue of employment mismatch is becoming important in the face of worsening job opportunities, owing to the economic slowdown and the increasing turnover rate of young employees. One way to resolve the mismatch is to determine the aptitude of graduates by performing genuine self-analysis through metacognition and reflection. The role model based e-portfolio (RMP) system, which we have hitherto proposed and developed, compares and analyzes role models (graduates) and their capability values. The document data (personal statements and job application forms), which the system has not utilized, contains subjective opinions and unquantifiable information. The occupation aptitude test and the diagnosis function of employment matching that use this document information can provide new insight, stimulating portfolio cycle by providing material for reflection. In this research, therefore, we conducted an analysis of the document data of role models, and developed and evaluated the occupation aptitude test and the diagnosis function of employment matching. These functions were then implemented into the RMP system to construct a career assisting system which promotes autonomous self-analysis activities.

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The role-play training is effective for project management education. We have developed an environment for training project management skills and also developed a software agent system which can play a role of a mentor. The result of a questionnaire survey shows the possibility to estimate learner's abilities and lesson's difficulty by using learner's behavior logs. And the effectiveness of the agent which plays a mentor is also described.

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This paper is the report of designed-based research focusing on the importance of repetitive revision cycle of learning design in educational practices. It deals with a Story-centered curriculum (SCC), which is new to domestic practices, to seek application possibility of SCC, in order to clarity findings from evaluation and revision of first tryouts. It is confirmed that scheduled revision not only facilitated reflection of the providers of the practice, but also learners' deeper understanding of the contents. Thus, both learners themselves and the community of learners were confirmed. This report deals only the first two years of practice, evaluation, and revision of the new approach. In order to assure wider application of the approach, it is necessary to sum up the results in the form of design principles, by reflecting the voices of learners, as well as the evidences of learning.

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This paper aims to examine a teaching worksheet we developed for PFF program for the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University launched in 2009. The worksheet was made by arranging Engestrom (1994)'s "Form for planning and analyzing instruction" for users to look back on their instruction for themselves viewing it on DVD. Applying it at a half day teaching seminar held at the end of the entire lecture series, we found the worksheet useful for reflecting on their teaching in terms of student learning, and also for understanding a variety of teaching components. However, more systematic program and involvement of faculty coordinators in it are needed to assist their instructional design including selection of appropriate teaching components and to help them understand teaching as a series of instructional processes realizing learning cycle.

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In the present study, we investigated the mechanism of the effects of presenting a rubric and fact patterns corresponding to each grading standard. 95 eighth-grade students were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 classrooms, each of which corresponded to an experimental condition. The participants studied mathematics for 5 sessions: at the end of the first day and the third day, the teacher gave a test on that day's lecture. The feedback methods for the test results varied according to each classroom's experimental condition: the rubric condition, the rubric plus fact pattern condition, or the comment-only condition. The results showed that students who received the rubric were more likely to consider that the purpose of the test was to show improvement than those who did not receive the rubric, and the rubric influenced intrinsic motivation, learning strategies, and test scores through the values of test. In addition, the results of this study suggested that informed assessment had an important role in values of test change. The results also revealed that fact patterns had no effect on the dependent variables.

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The Program to Foster Relational Skills, which the authors have been studying, was established with Behavioral Space Therapy, which was developed for young children with disabilities, as its foundation. The Program has demonstrated its effectiveness in efforts to provide parenting support. This paper methodologically examines techniques of analysis that are being developed, techniques of analysis that are in use in order to improve the precision of this Program. In particular, the paper examines the results of practice using visualization materials employing a New Device for Response Acquisition and Display (a prototype of PF-NOTE) developed to reflect on practice.

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