Japanese compulsory education had been praised because of its equality around the early 80s. However, since the third wave-educational reform that began in the 1980s and still persists, it has been pointed out that there are disparities between schools in terms of students' socioeconomic background and academic performance. Although there…

The conditions required for a reform of the educational finance system as the foundation of compulsory education are 1) devolution to schools and introduction of national standards in order to deal with "individual equality" while compensating for the insufficiency of "aspectual equality," and 2) dealing with educational needs…

Learning for disaster reconstruction carried out by teachers and children in schools faces the fundamental contradiction of how tragic memories leaving deep scars can be told and shared, and the attempts to deal with this problem. In this paper, in order to approach the issue of whether an educational practice which overcomes this contradiction is…

Lesson study (jugyou kenkyuu) has spread outside Japan in the last decade, providing opportunities to see how lesson study fares in countries where the instructional practices and curriculum materials differ from those in Japan. This study reports an elementary mathematics lesson study cycle from the United States. To investigate the nature of the…

Seikatsu-Tsuzurikata is an educational method related to teaching of written expression for children that was pioneered in elementary school education settings throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and which was widely adopted in Japan in the 1930s. It is a unique method developed in Japan that uses both school and non-school resources, not only in…

History and social studies textbooks have often been the object of heated political debate in various countries, since they relate directly to issues of national identity and citizenship. This article analyzes how "foreigners" are portrayed in two versions (the 2000 and 2006 versions, date of issue) of the best-selling elementary social studies…

Since the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japan's educational studies first began by receiving theories of practical education from the UK and U. S. Later, together with the political trends around 1890, there began a trend towards receipt of German educational studies. Along with the spread of elementary education, there were experiments with building…

We reported the major findings of our research based on our own academic achievement tests towards elementary school and junior high school pupils in 2002. We then pointed out the fact that the differences of achievement between social groups have been expanded. Nowadays, that issue is seen to be one of the most serious educational problems in…

Today, work and other societal practices are experiencing accelerating paradigm shifts from mass-production-based systems toward new systems based on networking between organizations, collaboration, and partnerships. This shift requires new paradigms in the fields of education, learning, and development. As human activity quickly changes to…