A.D. C. Peterson (1908-1988) was an English pedagogist and well known as the first Director General of the International Baccalaureate (IB).

This paper aims to examine his educational philosophy in two curriculum plans for upper secondary education through document surveys. The first plan is the reform of the English sixth-form curriculum in 1960. He was the Director of the Department of Educational Studies, Oxford, and strongly opposed to the over-specialization present in the sixth-form curriculum in England then. The second plan is the IB Diploma Programme established in 1968. After the failure of the English curriculum reform, he participated in founding IB and greatly influenced the shaping of its program.

He consistently emphasized general education in the sixth-form curriculum in each plan. Currently, general education refers to basic education for acquiring an ability to read and write or liberal arts education for knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, and not specialized knowledge education. However, Peterson had a characteristic philosophy of general education. In his concept, there is no conflict between general and specialized education. This is because the aim of his general education is not providing general knowledge, but developing ways of thinking: moral judgement, aesthetic taste, logical judgement, and empirical and experimental judgement.

He believed that every pupil could then develop such ways of thinking through each specialized subject, provided they study both arts and science course, as there are peculiar relations between the subjects and ways of thinking. For example, he claimed it possible to teach both moral judgment and social intuition either through literature or history, although the latter is probably better suited for developing empirical thinking; however, neither of these capacities can be developed through mathematics.

From the perspective of designing a curriculum, I point out two important achievements of Peterson’s. First, he argued uniquely that the essential aim in the sixth form is developing specific ways of thinking through each subject. He included both arts and science subjects in his curriculum for this purpose. Second, in the sixth-form curriculum reform, he devised a unifying and complementary course to compensate for each subject’s individual study by combining several subject matter and pupils’ experiences. This idea was succeeded by the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course as one of the core courses in the IB Diploma Programme. It is based on the notion that there are important ways of thinking common to several discipline.

Additionally, from the viewpoint of Peterson’s philosophy, it can be said of the IB Diploma Programme that he attempted to balance general and specialized education by setting a variety of subjects, and that he created an additional opportunity for general education through the TOK course.

The purpose of this study is to examine how students perceive the meaning of the curriculum which they are experiencing, by focusing especially on the transition from vocational courses to higher education.

The division between academic education and vocational education is one of the most important features of the secondary education system. Upper secondary schools in Japan are divided between general courses, which provide academic education to prepare students for higher education, and vocational courses, which provide vocational education to prepare students for entry into the labour market. However, associated with the shrinkage of the youth labour market and the widening of post-secondary admission quotas, vocational courses which have aimed to develop young people’s job skills have recently been required to respond to the demands for higher education. This change of relation between educational content and career path includes the likelihood of obscuring the value and legitimation of vocational education.

This study focuses on ‘relevance’, which is the importance given to educational content by individuals and society, and analyses the relevance that higher education-oriented students attached to the vocational course curriculum, based on the results of a three-year longitudinal survey conducted at two commercial-vocational high schools. In this study, I considered ‘relation’ and ‘interest’ to be a pair of axes constructing the overall ‘relevance of curriculum’: the ‘relation’ between educational content and students’ career perspective, and their ‘interest’ in vocational courses and subjects.

The findings of this paper can be summarised as follows. First, it was found that the proportion of students who maintained both interest and relation began and remained high for three years, although it declined year over year; that students who maintained only interest and students with neither interest nor relation tended to increase. Second, the analysis of the determinants of ‘type of perception of relevance’ of the students who intended to go on to higher education demonstrated that ‘current academic record’ and ‘interest in general subjects’ had a positive effect on the construction of the type that was positive with regard to both interest and relation. From this result, it was found that the construction and maintenance of interest in vocational subjects was significantly related with ‘interest in general subjects’ among students who intended to go to higher education from vocational education, and that the required condition to go to higher education, such as ‘academic record’, functioned to maintain students’ perception of the relation between the content they were learning and the field they intended to enter.

These results suggest that the relevance of educational content to specific fields of works, which has been a characteristic feature of vocational education, tends to weaken in the students’ transition from vocational education to higher education. It is inferred that the meaning and role of the vocational education curriculum as the specialised education is being diluted at the perceptions of students through weakening of its relation with specific fields of works, and it is drifting toward the nature of general education.

Evaluation is the core of the curriculum management (CM) cycle, but in Japan, evaluation is not conducted completely at many schools, nor has it been studied well in existing research. Previous research has led to the development of multiple CM evaluation tools, but their effects have only been evaluated at the individual level. The present study compared multiple evaluation tools developed separately in the same location under near identical conditions. The research objective was to provide findings that allow each school to choose or combine evaluation tools, and make it possible for evaluation to be conducted autonomously.

The research method adopted involved an empirical and practical survey over a period of three years. Those receiving in-service training (484 teachers and others in school management) performed trials with three different evaluation tools, and we performed a qualitative evaluation of each method. The three evaluation tools were (i) the School-Based Curriculum Development and Evaluation (SBCDE), using evaluation items and radar charts; (ii) the Checklist for Curriculum Evaluation in Japan (CCEJ), using free description; and (iii) the Curriculum Management Model for Analysis (CMMA), completing the structural model directly. After trying all three tools, the survey participants used a common framework to evaluate each method, describing its “positives,” “problems,” “appropriate usage,” and “required support.” The written descriptions were analyzed by means of text mining, and the characteristic words for each evaluation tool were extracted for correspondence analysis. The results showed mutually independent features for each of the evaluation tools, implying that they are not interchangeable, and confirming that the text mining analysis of the extracted words reflected adequate information.

The characteristics of each of the three methods were deduced based on the above data. Advantages of the SBCDE and the CMMA included a broad overview, of the CMMA an understanding of the relationships among elements, and of the CCEJ versatility in evaluating various individualized curricula. However, support was required for the SBCDE in selecting and modifying items according to the individual school, for the CCEJ in establishing evaluation criteria for subjective scoring, and for the CMMA in promoting understanding of the model itself and allowing time to complete it.

Based on these findings, we considered implementation issues. In terms of the objective and timeframe of evaluation, the SBCDE is optimal as a diagnostic and overall evaluation. The CMMA is suitable for a diagnostic evaluation with a broad, general view for planning strategies, while the CCEJ provides wide-ranging descriptions for formative evaluation. For managerial staff and mid-career educators who promote CM, the CMMA, which provides a bird’s eye view of the situation, is considered relatively effective. For young teachers, the easy response format of the SBCDE is regarded as particularly useful. The CCEJ is suitable for those in charge of an individual curriculum and those involved in its application. For organizing an evaluation, the SBCDE is easy to use for evaluation of all school faculty and staff. The CCEJ allows for better communication throughout the process by enabling those in charge to complete the process of filling the checklist together. The CMMA can be implemented using workshop-style group discussion.

In terms of future research, the development of a web application for combining multiple evaluation tools ought to be investigated.

This paper examined U-STARS~PLUS (Using Science, Talents, and Abilities to Recognize Students ~ Promoting Learning for Underrepresented Students), a gifted and talented education curriculum model recently developed in the United States, focusing on efforts to assuage racial discrimination in gifted and talented education from the viewpoint of curriculum development.

In discussions that use the development of U-STARS~PLUS as a background, I determined the current state of access inequality in gifted and talented education programs in the United States; this enabled me to confirm that the participation of minority children, mostly black and Hispanic, in gifted and talented education programs is at an unusually lower rate compared with white children. Among the factors that have particularly caused this issue to come to the fore in recent years, I identified an increasing number of racial minorities in public schools, as well as the actualization of inequality due to the expansion of gifted and talented education since the 1980s and the recognition of unfair access to gifted and talented education programs as a serious policy issue in gifted and talented education.

Subsequently, I examined the shared characteristics of curriculum models intended to expand minority access, indicating that minority underrepresentation is an issue of unfairness exclusively while acknowledging talented children. The results revealed that such curriculum models were expanded models that targeted not only children formally recognized as gifted but also all other children; further, it was also observed that most of these models had been developed to enable the gradual implementation of advanced investigational activities for determining children’s abilities.

Additionally, I outlined the development process and basic structure of U-STARS~PLUS, which was developed through funding from the federal government. It is indicated that U-STARS~PLUS places special emphasis on the systematic observation of children with potential ability, using Teacher’s Observation of Potential in Students (TOPS) to remove teacher bias against minorities and incorporating TOPS into the RTI model for the gifted, which is a new practical framework for gifted and talented education to ensure that U-STARS~PLUS develops into a more effective curriculum model.

Finally, I examined the effectiveness of TOPS based on the results of the inspection of the U-STARS~PLUS Project, which was implemented over 5 years from 2003 to 2008 and verified its results by fairly recognizing latent abilities in minority children. Consequently, I considered issues in the implementation of U-STARS~PLUS, which emphasizes finding solutions to the underrepresentation of minority students in gifted education.

In recent years, long working hours and unstable employment have emerged as serious problems in Japan, and criticism is directed at the “black companies”. In these circumstances, debates have regularly occurred regarding the type of education necessary for preparing the youth to develop desirable working lives in the future. Therefore, this paper focuses on Germany, which is internationally regarded as having high-class work environment standards and workers’ rights. It analyzes the study of labor and employment in political education (Politische Bildung: equivalent to Japanese social studies) and explores educational goals, learning content, and competency to be acquired.

German political education theory places foremost emphasis on human rights ideas under basic law (Grundgesetz) and the significance of democracy associated with the development of these rights. Therefore, it aims to achieve “learning democracy competency”. Economic learning also reviews problems with existing economic systems and policies while aiming to acquire competency to take action voluntarily.

The political education of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen), well-known for its innovative educational activities, also reflects this position. In the subject “Social Science (Sozialwissenschaften)”, which addresses political and economic problems in this state’s latter-stage secondary education, seven fields of study are included (market economy, political structure, individuals and society, economic policy, the European Union, social inequality, and international politics) under the aim of fostering democracy competency. Four competencies, acquiring knowledge, understanding, judgment, and action, are established as those to be learned through these seven fields. Study of labor and employment issues is also implemented within this framework. Early-stage secondary education’s political and economic subjects deal with labor concepts, labor laws and systems, and systems of social change. The social science subject in the latter-stage secondary education covers more complex labor and employment issues such as labor agreements, working hours legislation, labor negotiations, and wage policies. This aforementioned curriculum presents a consistent view of pursuing “labor quality” from the human rights perspective under basic law. Lesson development also mainly comprises resource materials and assignments and is intended to develop learners’ judgment abilities and cultivate personal opinion.

Regarding Japan, the course of study for social studies stipulates that the subject is supposed to emphasize human rights and address labor and employment issues. In contrast, textbook explanations are dictionary-like and tasks pertaining to learners’ acquiring competencies are unclear. Therefore, by using the concept of competency with reference to the German example, it is expected that the competencies to be acquired by learners can be clarified and actual classroom situations and textbook structure can be reformulated. However, a more fundamental issue is that it is necessary for each individual to seriously and specifically reconsider the kind of life/society they want to create in terms of values addressed through education such as human rights, democracy, and behavior and whether this reflection is consistent with the reality of educational activities.