In this study, it was examined whether the Internet in schools enhanced children's ability of practical use of information by comparing three schools in which the Internet was often used in classes with two schools in which it was not used. A quasi-experiment of secondary school students was conducted, and their ability of practical use of information was assessed twice before the Internet was often used and assessed once after then. Changes in the ability were analyzed with removing the effect of time trend. Results showed that the ability and its four components, that is, the abilities of collection, judgment, processing, and communication were more greatly improved for the students of schools in which the Internet was used.

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The purpose of this study was to examine spatial cognition in virtual environments for multimedia instructional materials. A virtual park space was made using 360-degree cylindrical panoramic images. It was necessary to be able to enter the environment, walk freely and explore the space. Video techniques do not allow such freedom of movement, so it was necessary to use VR media. It was expected that spatial cognition would be different between actual and virtual space. The participants were 7-12 year old children, whose task was to walk along the route-map and search for benches in the virtual park. Their processes of spatial cognition were analyzed. The results of the experiment highlighted the particular difficulties of using VR media in education. Several methods of improving VR media materials are proposed.

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In Computer-Assisted Language Learning System, the student makes various mistakes. Following constructivism, the system has to make him aware of his mistakes by himself, before pointing them out. One way to achieve the purpose is to allow the student compare his sentence with correct ones belonging to the same or different teaching items by retrieving and presenting such sentences. For that purpose, we are studying automated retrieval of sentences from corpora of Japanese text in terms of teaching items using the arts of NLP (Natural Language Processing) . The retrieval is carried out using teaching item extracting rules consisting of conditional parts coming from morphemic and syntactic informants and conclusion parts of teaching items. We have developed a repertoire of teaching item extracting rules. By using these rules, other than realizing automated retrieval, we can index the sentences by teaching items, thus speeding up the later retrieval or making them undergo scrutiny by the teacher before providing them to the students as assistance material for reading and writing. The performance of the prototypical automatic indexing system was examined by inspection. The accuracy was 87% and the recall rate was 89%. The prototype retrieval system was evaluated by professionals and volunteers engaged in teaching Japanese as second language. Their opinions are being implemented in the revised version.

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The paper proposes to develop ability of planning in learning by problem-solving, providing the learners with a repertoire of plans and their expansions into subplans as well as sample problems with solutions indexed by hierarchical use of plans and subplans for solving the problems. The learners can construct their plans on the system-supported planning environment and retrieve solutions of sample problems by way of the structured solution plan indices. A prototype system was implemented and tested in order to assess the significance of providing such an environment in developing ability of planning. The post tests in progression strongly suggested importance of sample problems with plan indices in being confident of applicability of newly learned plans.

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The purpose of this paper is to report the development and to evaluate the effectiveness of the "rTable", CSCL that supports participants' constructive argument and equal participation in their discussions in distance education. The participants in the rTable take on different roles ( i. e. coordinator, proposer, questioner and summarizer) by turns to discuss a topic. A comparative evaluation on a group of participants that used the rTable and the ordinary chat software ( i. e. Windows NetMeeting) was studied. The result of this evaluation shows that the discussions among the participants are less chaotic. Furthermore, it shows that participants' statements in the rTable have no inclinations forwards either "opinion" or "question". These results suggest that rTable has the potential to support participants' constructive argument and equal participation in their discussions.

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This paper provides some analysis of the distance education for multiple classes. We performed some distance instructions for multiple classes and some questionnaires. Furthermore, we analyzed the questionnaires by using the quantity method III. The following results are obtained. The important factors in distance education for multiple classes are ordered as follows; 1. unique features of the distance education, 2. comparative evaluation with broad cast education, 3. reality that students feel, 4. familiarity with the teacher, 5. facility to ask some questions, 6. comprehension of the instructed contents. In addition, the most important factor of the desirable distance education, which includes the factors from 1 to 6, is that a teacher recognized each student It also is pointed out that it is not so important that students can ask some questions in the class. This indicates that the most important factor of successful distance education for multiple classes is individual relationship between the teacher and the student. Moreover, the results derive that the unique instruction techniques based on distance education for multiple classes are 1. teacher manages to recognize each student, and 2. teacher manages to call many student's name and ask them some questions.

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In general, it is difficult for Japanese language learners of foreigners to master Chinese characters (KANJI). We developed an online instruction system of Chinese characters named "TERAKOYA KANTA" for foreign Japanese learners. This system evaluates the Chinese characters (KANJI) written by a user with a light pen or a tablet, and shows appropriate guidance about it. At first we considered features of Chinese characters seen from foreigners' eyes and realized an evaluation method by using vector information and stroke-speed information. Main features of this system are to be able to accommodate characters having a mistake in stroke order and to support learners not only as a drill of self-practice but also as a virtual teacher until getting up the Chinese characters' features, "HANE (Hook)" and "Harai (Stretch)" and so on. Moreover the effect of this system and learners desire to study is stimulated by using Multimedia. The experimental by 14 students from abroad indicates that our system "TERAKOYA KANTA" has much effective for mastering Chinese characters.

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The purpose of this research is to analyze what elements should be considered for discussion and debate at lectures through a video conference system. In the research, we focused on the discussion and debate through a video conference system via ISDN. We used the questionnaires and analyzed it by factor analysis. As a result, we extracted four factors named "verbal communication," "pictures and sounds," "nonverbal communication," and "interests in the discussion through the video conference system," as for the discussion. As for the debate, we extracted five factors named "concentration on the other classroom," "many exchanges of opinions," "response analyzer, "atmospheres of the classes," and "setting of the seats." Concerned with the general evaluation of the discussion, we found that it is related with "nonverbal communication," and "interests in the discussion through the video conference system." Concerned with that of the debate, we found that it is related with "many exchanges of opinions," "concentration on the other classroom," and "response analyzer. "

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The nursing profession contributes significantly to the health and welfare of the public. Consequently, society expects nurses to possess a current, working knowledge of the prevailing health care issues. Therefore , professional responsibility necessitates a life long commitment to personal development. In this paper, we describe the development of a WWW (World Wide Web) system for continuing nursing education. This system has the following four modules that support learners and teachers: A teaching materials database module , a CAI learning module , a teaching materials preparation module , and a CMI module. After we tested the system operation on the Internet for almost one year , we evaluated it using the results of questionnaires and access log data. These results suggest that our website system provides a favorable environment in which nurses can learn new specialized knowledge, and teachers can provide suitable training materials.

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[in Japanese]

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