With respect to the information education in elementary and secondary education in Japan, this study has shown its definition, educational contents, institutional positioning in educational curriculum, and the results of relevant research and studies. It also reviewed the studies on information education focusing on elementary and secondary education conducted by the JSET. Requirements for educational technology, which emerged from these reviews, were summarized into the following five points: (1) Continuous involvement in policy planning; (2) Elaborated investigations, which cannot be implemented by the government; (3) Development of indicators to evaluate the practice of information education; (4) Development of system, which support prolonged practices; (5) Mechanisms of knowledge sharing for the purpose of converting practical research into peer-reviewed articles.

We discuss information education in higher education, in particular, focusing on information education as a general education at the university. Information education as general education has information science as a meta-science in the background, then it is considered to be worthy as one of the main subject of general education.

If learners cannot form an intention to take an appropriate action with knowledge about information ethics, it cannot be said that the learners have acquired the knowledge in essence. In the present study, the two experiments are conducted to examine if the knowledge-to-action gap can be confirmed by means of paper-and-pencil tests consisting of knowledge and intention tasks for high school students. The knowledge task is to inquire about appropriate behavior regarding the correct knowledge, while the intention task is an inquiry whether the respondents consciously select the action or not. The experiments 1 and 2 indicated that participants take unethical behaviors even though they have appropriate knowledge. In addition, the experiment 2 indicated that the participants guessed the number of classmates with unethical behavior is higher than the actual number. These results demonstrate the importance of education for information ethics, which needs to be carefully designed to bridge the gap between knowledge and action to comply with information ethics.

This study aims to investigate the causal relationships between college students’ media/social media usage and their Internet literacy, controlling for the effects of social skills and gender differences on them. We conducted a panel survey targeting Japanese college students and analyzed based on 107 students’ responses. The following results were clarified. (a) The college students perceived that they can make new friends through the usage of Twitter and Facebook, and they did communicate with those whom they never knew before by using Twitter and Facebook. (b) For male students, improving their Internet literacy about Facebook use help them increase their frequency of making posts on Facebook, and also help improve their social skills. (c) For female students, increasing their frequency of making posts on Facebook help contribute to their Internet literacy.

A computer programming class was implemented for the upper elementary grades in which each student uses a tablet device. The class was jointly taught by elementary school class teachers and junior high school manual training course teachers. The latter were assigned to concurrently teach in elementary schools while developing teaching units featuring exercise-based and companion-formatting-based stepwise tasks. An analysis of lesson observations and teacher interviews revealed that the portability of tablet devices and the presence of junior high school manual training course teachers benefitted the computer programming teaching. Furthermore, analysis of an attitude survey of the students found that the exercise-based and companion-formatting-based stepwise tasks improved their willingness to perform the computer programming activities and to employ their practical skills to use data.

It is necessary to bring up the 21st century type qualities and abilities synthetically through various school learning activities. We expected to bring them up by utilizing digital storytelling, and we put it in actual integrated studies of a junior high school. The investigation of <consciousness about one’s ability> was performed to compare with the previous research in a university. Some improvements were found in some items. We analyzed every item from the viewpoint of the structure of the 21st century type qualities and abilities, and we found the feature of digital storytelling is; it can bring up the ability <to be able to use tools interactively>. But we did not find improvement in every quality and ability, thus we made another lesson plan to improve the results. The new lesson plan uses a worksheet in expectation to raise the quality of learning activities. Through this research, the possibility of the digital storytelling as the practical learning activity to bring up the 21st century type qualities and abilities was indicated. Moreover we grasped the viewpoints for the farther research.

In this paper, we review the national curricula for primary and secondary schools in the UK, Australia and USA, and report on their contents and features. The ICT education in these three advanced countries is defined in terms of certain key goals, e.g., abstraction, problem solving, algorithms, data, evaluation, collaboration, etc. These are based on computational thinking, and include programming education as a part of the curriculum. In terms of programming education, students in the lower grades of primary school solve quizzes and learn simple logic for control robots. In the upper primary grades, they develop visual-language programs that include conditional statements and loops. In secondary school, they develop text-language programs that include different types of data and modular programming. Although the new curricula are aimed more at computer science, they still include ICT literacy in the lower grades, e.g., e-safety and information ethics.

This report reviews procedures, processes and technical aspects of the NAP – ICT 2005-2014. As a result, the following was identified as methods of Australian study, 1) uses six processes skills and three strands, defines the proficient levels, 2) selects the online method for the investigation, 3) finds the changing in the average performance of Year 6 students and Year 10 students, 4) tries to consider the improvement of initiatives across the States and Territories for each Year using results of investigations.