The purpose of this study is to make clear ideas of Sasaoka Tadayoshiʼs teaching of composition. Sasaoka Tadayoshi is called the father of ʻthe composition based on dairy lifeʼ. He was the chief editor of ʻTUZURIKATA SEIKATUʼ that played an important part in early movement of ʻthe composition based on dairy lifeʼ. His ideas were explained by using the word ʻKanjin(perfect person)ʼ or ʻGenshi kodomo (primitive child)ʼ so far. But those words leave to be desired, because those fixed concepts were not enough to explain his ideas comprehensively. This study especially focussed on ʻGenshi kodomoʼ and described the ideas of Sasaoka Tadayoshiʼs teaching comprehensively. The very core of his ideas is ʻrelative independenceʼ. This is the ethos that makes teachers, students, parents, and readers sensible at educational matters. The ethos also encourages people to release from dogma and face up to reality sincerely.

This study gives a guidance report of poem composition the process of which Geneplore model is applied to. The participants were students who majored in education in one of Japanese universities. The Geneplore model was originally proposed by Finke et al. They claimed that creativity is broken down into two distinct phases; a generative phase and an exploratory phase. In the generative phase, an individual constructs representations called preinventive structures. In an exploratory phase, an individual explores and interprets underlying meaning of these structures,which are eventually used to come up with creative products. Following the Geneplore model,the guidance reported in this study also has two steps. The first step corresponds to the generative phase, where students are asked to construct preinventive structures. In this guidance, Rodariʼs fantastic binominal is used for constructing stories. These stories are used as preinventive structures. The second step corresponds to the exploratory phase. Students explore the meaning of preinventive structures which are constructed in the first step. Concretely, students interpret the story as some kind of metaphor and construct the sentences according to their metaphorical interpretations. And interpretative sentences are condensed into the short poem. Last, the appropriate title is put on the poem and the poem is completed. The process of this guidance was carefully described and reviewed in this study. The results indicated the effectiveness of the model for designing the guidance of poem composition.

Recent studies have shown that self-explanation is an effective strategy and that explaining to oneself encourages students to monitor and revise their mental models. However, some studies suggest that othersʼ existence influences learning. This study explored the influence of offering different instructions to undergraduate students while they learned an expository text on physics. All students were instructed to explain their learning outcomes to others (explain-to-others condition, 13 students) or to themselves (self-explanation condition, 14 students). The results revealed that the students who were assigned to the explain-to-others condition performed better than the students under the self-explanation condition on the comprehension test. The analysis of the studentsʼexplanations suggests that the explain-to-others condition made students focus their attention on revising their mental models, while the selfexplanation condition made students focus only on monitoring.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of picture-book reading experience on attitudes toward reading and images of the reader in junior college students. Ninety seven female junior college students of early childhood education major served as the subjects. At the beginning of an ordinary class, they were asked to complete a questionnaire to assess their attitudes toward reading and their images of the reader. After then, they were asked to select a favorite picture-book and read it aloud in front of the peer audience of the class. Over the successive 11 weekly sessions, the students mutually took the role of reader and audience according to a schedule in advance. At the end of the final session, the students were asked again to complete the same questionnaire as the beginning of the class. A comparison of pre-and post assessment revealed that the experience of picture-book reading in front of peer students and listening to the peer reading produced more friendly attitudes toward reading and that the students were likely to idealize the person who like reading, and that the images about the person who like reading changed as much more soft.