Japanese teacher education faces the urgent necessity of enhancing master level instruction for a number of in-service teachers to increase their professional competency. In such circumstance, it is indispensable to develop a new research methodology suitable for practical teaching to replace the conventional methodology adopted in academic study on instruction. Research methods can be classified into three approaches such as empirical, systems, and normative approach. This paper describes the research method from the empirical approach point of view, and proposes a method to convert a teacher's tacit knowledge of practical teaching to formalized knowledge in the form of category, concept, model, and proposition. This formalization of empirical knowledge is indispensable for constructing an information network for the effective dissemination of experiences in teaching.

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A writing process support tool called 'Card Processor' for sentence production for creating composition has been developed and evaluated. In this tool 'Card Processor', the user interface allows the user to make sentences and arrange the structures of sentences by way of card arrangement. An evaluation experiment for composing with 'Card Processor' and the text editor (Microsoft Word 97) was done. The results of this experiment suggest that there is a tendency to construct sentences on a lot of numbers of topics concerning the theme when sentences were made using 'Card Processor'. A characteristic difference was found between both tools in time spent, in input work and in final production work, i.e., the polished work. It was clarified that 'Card Processor' supports "generating, organizing, and goal setting" in the sentence making process, whereas text editor supports only "reading and editing" in the sentence making process.

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When one looks back on his/her notes and memos taken before, the context information like what references were used is easily lost, and often hard to recreate. Reserving traces for such referencing, including references to others' notes, is expected to be highly beneficial for collaborative learning. We have developed a note-taking system, the ReCoNote or the Reflective Collaboration Note, to implement such record keeping. Notes are taken with mutual bi-directional links with explicit comments. The ReCoNote has been used in university classrooms successfully. The students gradually got used to the collaborative uses of links, and found several useful ways to use the ReCoNote to help themselves engage in more productive learning activities.

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This paper describes a new and efficient method of ability parameter estimation using answer-until-correct (AUC) procedures in computer-based testing. The AUC procedure for multiple choice items allows second and subsequent choices from the distractors until the correct choice is made, if the subject's first choice is incorrect. The model used for this estimation is an extension of the nominal response (NR) model of item response theory (IRT). The characteristic and information functions of the AUC response paths are formulated in this paper. Simulated data were used to investigate the efficiency of the AUC model. Data were generated for 1,300 examinees with tests having 9, 11, 13, 17 or 21 items with three alternative choices. The ability parameters estimated by the AUC model were more accurate than those estimated by the NR model. These results confirm that the AUC model can estimate ability parameters as accurately as the NR model and requires fewer test items.

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NISHINOSONO (1995) proposed, a framework to study the improvement of teaching : Judgemental proposition for instructional technology (NISHINOSONO 1994), a formula to predict technology (POPPER 1972) and a formula to eliminate errors (POPPER 1972). The purpose of this paper is to integrate these three into a comprehensive framework which helps us to have a general view of the study ,of the improvement of teaching. Furthermore, a case study of a mathematics class that employed the integrated framework will be shown. In this case, the criterion to eliminate errors is based on the data collected through questionnaires.

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