Kiyomi Akita

In order to investigate how images of teaching change in the course of expertise, experienced teachers, novice teachers, students who took teacher education courses at the university, and students who didn't take them were compared on metaphor-making tasks. They were asked to make metaphors on 3 topics : ''Lesson, Teacher and Teaching'', Both teachers and students made almost the same amount of metaphors, In the contents of the metaphors, however, there were some differences between them. Many students had images of teaching as transmission and routine work, and of teacher as teller. On the contrary, many expert teachers had images of teaching as joint construction with pupils and managing unpredictable situations, and of teacher as helper and supporter. These results suggested that students had explicit preconceptions about teaching before becoming teachers and their images of teaching changed with expertise.

The purposes of this study were to examine mothers' conceptions of book-reading to their children and relations between those conceptions and their behavior styles of setting home environment on reading. Two hundred and ninety-three mothers in Study 1 and three hundred and thirty-two mothers in Study 2 answered a questionnaire concerning their recognitions on the functions, and their behavior of setting environment. The main findings were as follows : (1)Two functions were identified as ''UTILITY'' and ''ENJOYMENT'' (''UTILITY'' : read to get children to master letters and acquire knowledge; ''ENJOYMENT'' : read to share a fantasy world with their children and communicate them.) Although many mothers attached importance to ''ENJOYMENT'' function, some mothers did to ''UTILITY''; but differences were shown among mothers. (2) Mothers changed the ways of reading according to their children's age. (3) There were relations between conceptions of functions and ways of reading. Though mothers rated ''UTILITY'' higher, their reading styles were seen to promote children to become independent readers.

The purpose of this study was to clarify developmental changes of the conceptions (evaluations and meanings) and feelings about book reading, and to examine relations between conceptions, feelings and behavior frequency. Five hundred and six children of 3rd, 5th, and 8th grades answered the questionnaire about reading. Three major findings were as follows. First, all children shared the same evaluation that reading was a good activity. Second, three meanings of reading were identified: an exogenous meaning of “getting praise and good grades” (PRAISE), a cognitive endogenous meaning of “having a fantasy world and getting knowledge” (FANTASY), and a physiological endogenous meaning of “refreshing and killing time” (REFRESHING). Older children evaluated the cognitive endogenous meaning of FANTASY more and the exogenous meaning of PRAISE less. Third, positive feelings were predicted from 3 variables: grade, evaluation and FANTASY meaning. Behavior frequency was predicted from 3 variables: grade, positive feelings and the REFRESHING meaning. © 1993, The Japanese Association of Educational Psychology. All rights reserved.

This paper exarmined to what extent and when parents influence their children's book-reading activities. The following were assumed to be the four aspects of the family environment which mediate this influence : (1) provider of physical environment (PP), measured by the number of books at home ; (2) model of expert book-reading (ME), parents' own frequency of book-reading ; (3) encouragement of children's reading activities (RE), the taking children to the library, etc. ; and (4) co-participant in reading (CP), frequency of reading books with children, etc. Third, fifth and eighth graders (N=506) answered a questionnaire about their family's influence on their reading. The main results were as follows. (1) The parents performed these roles more frequently the more they personally liked reading. (2) Direct parent-child interactions such as RE and CP scores were positively related to their influence on children's feelings, but PP and ME scores were not so related. (3) PP scores were positively related to the frequency of reading. These latter two results show that some roles relate to children's feelings and some roles relate to the frequency of activities. (4) The influence of parents declined at children's higher age levels.

This study was an attempt to investigate children's (4, 5, 6, 8 years old) narrative skills in terms of causal sequencing. Ss were asked to produce two stories from two sets of nine pictures. If Ss couldn't continue telling, the experimenter prompted them by either strong or weak prompts. First, each story protocol was analyzed into propositions and categorized by content (actions, object states, person's states, mental states) then, stated causal relations were categorized into four types, i.e. Resultant, Initiation, Enablement, and Motivation. The major results were as follows. 1) The numbers of phrases and propositions, and of causal production increased with age. 2) Older children could mention the character's mental states more than younger children. 3) The types of causal relations changed with age. Initially, children's stories were linked together with action-states relations. From 6-years old almost all children could use causal relations with mental states. 4) Strong prompts seemed to have more effect on quantity than weak prompts. But the condition of prompting was unfortunately confounded with frequency of prompts in this study. A more careful study should be planned in the future. © 1987, The Japanese Association of Educational Psychology. All rights reserved.