National culture determines educational culture. The educational culture characteristics of each country will be demonstrated through the awareness of education, the way the educational apparatus is organized, and the way that education deals with the crisis in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic on a global scale. The study uses structural…

Twenty-five years have passed since a teaching technique, called shadowing, was introduced in Japanese EFL contexts. Recently, this technique has gradually been recognized around the world. Given that many studies have been published about shadowing, the time is ripe to summarize the results of the studies and to propose how shadowing should be…

This article briefly reviews the history of intellectual assessment with children and youth in Japan, as well as current practices and future directions. The history of intelligence test use in Japan began in the early 20th century. Since the 21st century, three major intelligence tests, namely, the Wechsler Intelligence Scales, the Kaufman…

In Experiment 1, Japanese children (4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds (n = 78)) and adults (n = 36), answered questions about the possibility of psychogenic bodily reactions, i.e., bodily outcomes with origins in the mind. The 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers typically denied that bodily conditions could originate in mental states. Developmentally,…

In 5 experiments, we studied precautionary decisions in which participants decided whether or not to buy insurance with specified cost against an undesirable event with specified probability and cost. We compared the risks taken for precautionary decisions with those taken for equivalent monetary gambles. Fitting these data to Tversky and…

This article examines the record of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's interrogation as a thought criminal following his arrest in July, 1943. By comparing and contrasting his responses and statements against the official government positions, I hope to clarify the nature of his critique of the wartime fascist regime. Makiguchi himself was an educator, and…

Do some forms of student (and school) assessment hinder the introduction of innovative educational practices and the development of innovation skills in education systems? This report focuses on the impact of high-stake summative assessment on innovation and argues that it is possible to reconcile high-stakes assessments and examinations through…

This study aims to report an attempt to design and organise a content-based EAP reading course in political science and economics at a university in Japan, and to shed some light on learners' actual practices and preferences through the use of survey- and interview-based research participated in by 438 students. A principal axis of this project…

In this article, 41 models of covariation detection from 2 x 2 contingency tables were evaluated against past data in the literature and against data from new experiments. A new model was also included based on a limiting case of the normative phi-coefficient under an extreme rarity assumption, which has been shown to be an important factor in…

This article reports on a study investigating ways students from Japan studying English as a second language at an American community college encounter cultural dissonance in their classroom interactions. I take a sociocognitive view rooted in the work of Bakhtin and Vygostky to explore the ways language, culture, and cognitive processes interplay…

US children's books are a rich source of information about mental states (Dyer, Shatz, & Wellman, 2000). Examining books from other cultures can determine whether and how such information is conveyed by other languages. Forty US and 40 Japanese picture books for preschoolers were compared. The books were coded for references to mental state…

The author shares his own experiences in the design of culturally appropriate human resources development programs in Asia. He discusses the differences in cognitive models of causation: Japanese cognition and western cognition. (CT)

Age- and IQ-balanced 27 children with high-functioning (IQ greater than or equal to 70) pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (HPDDNOS) and 27 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were compared on the Japanese version of Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Third Edition (WISC-III) and the Childhood…

It is suggested that perceptions of the self, of others, and of the relationship between self and others are very powerful and that this influence is clearly reflected in culture. The independent view of the self, represented in Western culture, is contrasted with the interdependent view in many other cultures. (SLD)

This study is to explore the potential of Fauconnier's mental space theory in understanding the teaching and learning processes of mathematics. Notions from cognitive linguistics have been introduced to research in mathematics education recently, but there have been little studies about what potential the framework of mental space has in…