This study considers the unique background of high schools and reforms, emphasizing “composition ability” in establishing the new high school “Modern Japanese Language” and clarifying its goal. In particular, we focused on the information and problem awareness that the government had at that time, and the views of the researchers involved in the revision.

We clarified the existence of research materials showing the low level of writing education in high schools in a country aiming to become a science and technology nation. We also clarified the existence of the “Conant Report,” which has attracted attention in the United States with its emphasis on writing. It is shown as a mixture of Kenji Morioka’s view of essay education, which was devoted to introducing composition theory, and the opinions of Motoki Tokieda, who attempted to build his own essay education theory based on language process theory. It was Japan’s unique view of “composition ability.”

Focusing on the “operational capability for kanji,” this study aims to identify a method for structuring and describing “academic ability regarding kanji.”

First, I surveyed a series of studies by Koichi Chijiiwa and Chieko Kano and clarified how they discussed “operational capability for kanji.” The results highlighted the following two issues.

(1) Positioning “operational capability” and “knowledge” in the structure of “academic ability regarding kanji.”

(2) Describing the relationship between academic ability in other domains, such as reading and writing, and “academic ability about kanji.”

To solve these two issues, I used Marzano’s “New Taxonomy.” In the new taxonomy, “operational capability” and “knowledge” could be systematically described as academic ability. Additionally, the new taxonomy can describe academic ability in problem-solving situations such as “reading” and “writing.”

This study utilized a field survey to clarify (a) how children in the introductory period of elementary school learn kana writing through instruction and (b) the problems in the instruction process. Observers collected daily episodic data from April to December 2017 from a typical first-grade public elementary school classroom in Japan using the observational method (ethnography). Data from the episodes were collated in an Excel file, distinguishing between “facts” and “comments” in the field notes. How children acquire kana characters in individual ways was determined based on the episodic data. Episodic data analysis revealed that children faltered while acquiring phonological analysis skills and understanding notation. Further, as teachers were found to evaluate children’s acquisition of letters based only on what was written, monitoring each child’s growth became ineffective. Therefore, teachers must focus on children’s pace of learning, allowing them time to understand and grow in the introductory years of elementary school.

This study aimed to organize the components of learners’ metacognitive knowledge in discussion-based learning and capture their learning styles. First, metacognitive knowledge in discussion-based learning was categorized based on the findings of communication research in psychology and the results of previous studies on discussion-based learning instruction. Next, two surveys were conducted on 37 sixth-graders of a public elementary school in Tokyo, where the author teaches, using the categorization as a viewpoint for analysis. Table 3 summarizes the components of learners’ metacognitive knowledge derived from analyzing the results of the two surveys and the status of acquisition of each component. Table 3 further shows the metacognitive knowledge components of the target students in the target class. This can be used as an indicator to understand sixth-graders’ learning style in elementary school.

Two of the problems facing the kanji test in educational practices are motivating learners and cultivating kanji operational skills. This study aims to simultaneously research and develop practices to solve these two problems. Focusing on kanji subtests in elementary schools, we devised an approach of “writing other examples,” in which other examples of kanji were written, and practical research was carried out.

As a result, learners increased the number of other examples they wrote every time, wrote kanji with examples not described in textbooks, and used more kanji in essays. There was also an improvement in kanji reading and writing skills. Using M-GTA to analyze the factors behind the learners’ changes, we discovered a cyclical effect, triggered by the increase in motivation. We also found that the quality of the learning method for the kanji test improved in the direction of vocabulary building.

The Common Core State Standards has demanded the critical integration of multiple informational texts in the United States in recent years. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium has developed performance tasks as summative assessments that require students to read multiple informational texts critically and write an argumentative essay. To introduce this challenging performance task to Japanese readers, I analyzed 5th, 8th, and 11th grade tasks.

Results show that information on conflicting arguments became more complicated as the grade increased. In Grade 8, students needed to find more relevant information from conflicting arguments. Furthermore, in the 11th grade, students needed to analyze rhetorical features, qualify expressions related to reliability in the texts, and infer the audience’s concerns from the scenario. On the other hand, it was found that the rubric had difficulty assessing students’ scores accurately. Therefore, there is a need to modify the rubric.