Five American middle school students went to Japan for two weeks in 1983 as ambassadors for American art education. Art education in Japan is much more centralized than in America. In addition to school study, children are exposed to traditional arts like the tea ceremony, calligraphy, and ikebana. (CS)

The common assumption that Japanese students do well academically because their schools are more academically oriented than American schools is misguided. Results of a study comparing middle-school teachers in Japan and the United States indicated that American teachers allocated a greater proportion of their time to academic work than did…

Computational strategies and estimating abilities of 466 Japanese students were tested and interviews with a subsample of that group were used to compare with a theoretical model based on a sample from the United States. Results of the comparison of computational and estimating abilities are presented. (CW)

In 1986 the United States (U.S.)-Japan Seminar on Mathematical Problem Solving convened to compare the state of problem solving in the classroom and in research in the two countries. The data and results given in this paper are the results of research conducted in the United States in response to the 1986 seminar. The U.S. and Japanese research…