In order to evaluate the responsiveness to rhythmic stimulation of children with mental retardation, the present study measured quantitatively various types of responses activated by rhythmic stimulation, including the temporal characteristics of the children's rhythmic response and of the body movements they made during the stimulation. Seven rhythmic patterns were presented, and the instruction was given to beat a drum at will during the stimulation. Of the seven patterns, three were simpler, pulse-like rhythms, and four were more complex, including a skip or a pause. Subjects were 52 children with mental retardation, ranging in chronological age from 6 yr. 9 mo. to 18 yr. 9 mo. (17 children were between 6 and 12 years old; 13, between 13 and 15 years old; and 22, between 16 and 18 years old). For those subjects whose IQs could be measured, the mean IQs were 52.2, 45.9 and 49.5 in those three age groupings respectively. In addition, 51 children without mental retardation, between the chronological ages of 2 yr. 8 mo. and 6 yr. 7 mo., were also studied. In all groups, synchronized beating of the drum as a main type of response increased with chronological age. In the children without mental retardation, stable synchronized responses to the simpler patterns appeared at about 5 years of age. Although the simpler rhythms were easily synchronized with by most of the children, more than 50% of the children in the older two groups of those with mental retardation responded synchronously also to the more complex patterns, whereas the children without mental retardation showed rather irregular responses to those patterns. Another type of response to the rhythmic stimulation was self-paced but quite regular drum beating, irrespective of the tempo of the stimulus. This response type was observed frequently in the children without mental retardation who were 4 to 5 years old, and in the children with mental retardation whose mental age was 5 to 6 years. Some of the children with mental retardation with even higher mental ages showed the same type of response. One of the characteristic response styles in the children with mental retardation was an intermittent beating, or replacing the skip with an equi-interval pulse. These flexible responses were found in the older children. Some rhythmic fluctuations appeared in the bodily sway of the subjects during stimulation, without overt beating of the drum. It was suggested that, with increasing age, synchronization becomes a main pattern of the response to rhythmic stimulation; especially, flexible rhythmic expression is related to chronological age or musical experience, although the self-paced response appearing prior to synchronization is related to mental age. Furthermore, the detailed study of body movements during stimulation may provide a useful measure of the whole response activated by rhythmic stimulation in children with mental retardation.

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This study investigated the development of children's concepts of illness. A total of 310 children (74 with renal disease, 82 with asthma, and 154 with no special health problems), aged 8 to 12 years, were examined by the method of free recall. Children were asked to write the names of illnesses as many as possible. A comparison across age groups showed that a developmental change in concepts of illness occurred at about 11 years of age. Although the expansion of illness concepts and the developmental tendency were similar, the inner structure of illness concepts was different in the children with chronic illnesses and in those with no special health problems. Because, like other concepts, illness concepts are multi-dimensional, their differences would not be developmental differences.

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The Third Primary School Act of 1900 (the second revision of the Primary School Act of 1886) made it compulsory for every child to attend school for four years. But the Act allowed primary-school-age children's guardians to keep physically weak and undeveloped children at home, exempted the guardians of mentally or physically disabled children from the duty to make the children attend primary school, and granted guardians who were too poor to send their children to primary school either temporary or permanent exemption from this duty. This study investigated when and by what process these provisions were implemented in Aomori Prefecture and Hirosaki City. After the passage of the Third Primary School Act of 1900, Aomori Prefecture formulated rules to compel every child to attend school, and especially encouraged girls to do so. Hirosaki City set up a register of school-age children and encouraged guardians to send their children to school. As a result, the enrollment ratio in Aomori Prefecture increased rapidly. In Aomori Prefecture and Hirosaki City, regulations concerning temporary or permanent exemption from school attendance did not become fully effective until the 1920s. This conclusion is supported by the following facts: 1. In 1900, Aomori Prefecture formulated detailed rules about the school attendance of school-age children, and in 1902, the prefecture issued official reports about guardians who were temporarily or permanently exempted from the requirement, and their children. After this, Hirosaki and other cities made similar reports and did everything possible to encourage school-age children to attend school. 2. In the 1920s, Aomori Prefecture and Hirosaki City had a complete list of the school-age children in their jurisdiction. 3. In the 1920s, "poverty" disappeared as a reason for exemption, so that "disability" remained as the only reason. 4. After the 1920s, the number of children who did not attend primary school showed little variation.

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First-grade teachers in Joetsu City were surveyed with a questionnaire that asked about the learning of handwriting in their students who had a disability in writing Japanese letters (hiragana) and the methods used to deal with this problem. The results were as follows: 1. The prevalence of a disability in writing Japanese letters was about 0.92% (15 children out of 1,638), with the prevalence in boys being about 3.7 times that in girls. 2. Of the 15 children identified as having a disability in writing Japanese letters, 12 could write 21 or more letters out of the 46 in the syllabary while the other three could write fewer than 5 letters. 3. In these children's writing, their letters were generally correct in shape, but not in fine details. 4. The acquisition of characteristics related to handwriting, such as intelligence, spatial cognition, and fine motor skills, was delayed in the children with a disability in writing Japanese letters. 5. Individual guidance was given to every child who needed it. 6. Individual guidance was generally done by having the children practice copying or tracing letters and observe demonstrations. 7. Some children did not learn handwriting in spite of the individual guidance. This result suggests that the methods of individual guidance for children with a disability in writing Japanese letters should be improved further.

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The condition of many children with severe mental and physical disabilities gradually deteriorates while they are still young. The behavior of such children often can be understood only in relation to the particular environmental circumstances in which each child lives. Because the children's habitat has this special importance, teachers must concern themselves with how the environment is structured; that is, instructional goals must be developed in relation to the children's unique ecological environments, including the teachers themselves. Both the children and the teachers must have clear objectives. To identify these, a careful assessment must be made of the particular values brought to the child-teacher interaction by both the child and the teacher. Often these two sets of values will differ, and sometimes they will actually be in conflict, thus creating problems. It is the view of the present author, however, that the goal should not be the elimination of such problems; rather, we should try to use such problems to understand how the child, on the one hand, and the teacher, on the other, relate to the particular characteristics of the educational setting in which their interaction takes place. Research with behavior settings (Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1989) may provide a means of measuring the extent to which the behavior of a particular child deviates from the typical patterns of behavior characteristic of some behavior setting. A behavior setting is the basic unit of analysis of the ecological environment. It is defined in terms of its physical and temporal characteristics and the program of regularly occurring or standing patterns of behavior of the inhabitants of the setting. The present author proposes to examine all the behavior settings at school for some children, to document the children's behavior through direct observation, and to reflect on the appropriateness of the children's behavior in relation to the standing pattern of each behavior setting. This will require, first, the completion of behavior setting survey, that is, the identification and description of all the settings in the school. Then the behavior of the children will be examined, as will the child-teacher interactions in the various settings, in three time frames: (1) Immediate: direct observation of the children's behavior and child-teacher interactions on a daily basis; (2) Short Time Interval: reflection by the present author on the course of the educational program in the past month; and (3) Long Time Interval: reflection by the present author on the child-teacher interaction over a longer span of time, such as six months or even longer than that.

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