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With study abroad becoming an integral part of the American higher-education curriculum, home-institution instructors face the challenge of understanding the type and content of learning taking place abroad. We report on a study conducted at a service academy on the U.S. East Coast to examine American college students' cultural learning in the course of a summer study abroad program in Japan. Seven engineering majors completed pre- and post-study abroad seminars, and completed a culture survey before and after their trip to Japan in 2008. Content analysis of the students' responses to open-ended questions revealed gains in students' cultural knowledge on various aspects of the Japanese culture, leading to changes in their perceptions of Japan and Japanese people. The study adopted the cultural framework set forth by the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages. (Contains 2 figures.)

The purpose of this study was to examine the construct validity of a classroom communication apprehension scale. Subjects were 196 high school students in Japan. The original English version of a classroom communication apprehension scale (M. R. Neer, 1987) consisted of 20 items representing 2 hypothesized dimensions of classroom communication apprehension: confidence and participation. The Japanese translation of the scale was comprised of the same items representing the same two dimensions. The internal consistency reliability for each of the two subscales was 0.81 and 0.82 respectively. Exploratory factor analysis using a principal axis factoring method with an oblique (promax) rotation extracted 4 factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0, collectively accounting for 61% of the total variance. Results of confirmatory factor analyses provide little support for the factor structures of both the a priori two-factor model and a four-factor model. The study concludes that for the sample of high school students in this study the Japanese version of the classroom communication apprehension scale is a multidimensional construct. However, results provide little support for the presence of the two hypothesized dimensions. The findings of the study suggest the needs for redefinition of the dimensions of classroom communication apprehension. (Contains 3 tables and 19 references.) (Author/SLD)

The purpose of this study was to examine the construct validity of a classroom communication apprehension scale for a sample of 196 high school students in Japan. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used. The original English version of a classroom communication apprehension scale (M. Neer, 1987) consisted of 20 items representing 2 hypothesized dimensions of classroom communication apprehension: Confidence and Participation. The Japanese translation of the scale contained the same items representing the same two dimensions. The internal consistency reliability for the two subscales of the translation was 0.81 and 0.82 respectively. Exploratory factor analysis using a principal axis factoring method with an oblique (promax) rotation extracted four factors with eigenvalues greater than 1, collectively accounting for 61% of the total variance. Results of the confirmatory factor analyses provided little support for the factor structures of both the a priori two-factor model and a four-factor model. The study suggests that for the sample of high school students in this study the Japanese version of the classroom communication apprehension scale is multidimensional. Study results provide little support for the presence of the two hypothesized dimensions. The findings of this study suggest the need of redefinition of the dimensions of classroom communication apprehension. (Contains 4 tables and 21 references.) (SLD)

The purpose of this study was to examine a profile of academic self-concept for a sample of 293 students of a private girls-only high school in Japan as measured by the Dimensions of Self-Concept (DOSC)-Form S, Japanese version (W. Michael and others, 1984). The DOSC-Form S, Japanese version, yields five scores associated with the five underlying dimensions of academic self-concept: Level of Aspiration, Anxiety, Academic Interest and Satisfaction, Leadership and Initiative, and Identification versus Alienation. Past studies involving Japanese college students have reported that Japanese college students display dispositions indicative of low self-concept relative to their American counterparts, but little empirical study has been done on the academic self-concept of Japanese high school students. Japanese high schools constitute a unique subculture within the entire Japanese educational system, characterized by intensive preparation and competition for college entrance. Data from this study show lower academic self-concept for these students compared with U.S. high school students, but the subjects in this study represent only one segment of the diverse Japanese high school population. (Contains 2 tables and 23 references.) (Author/SLD)