Abstract: The paper explores the relationship between procrastination in academic contexts and three sub-concepts of non-cognitive abilities: self-efficacy, self-acceptance, and self-regulated learning strategies. The study at Sophia University involved collecting data on students' procrastination behavior and non-cognitive abilities through questionnaires and Moodle logs. The findings reveal a weak negative correlation between procrastination and the three sub-concepts. Among them, self-regulated learning strategies showed the strongest negative correlation (-0.28) and were identified as the sub-concept most closely associated with procrastination. The cluster analysis divided participants into two groups: those procrastinating longer and those procrastinating less. The latter group scored higher in self-acceptance and self-regulated learning strategies. The study concludes that while procrastination has a limited correlation with the studied non-cognitive abilities, self-regulated learning strategies stand out as significantly related to procrastination behavior. This sub-concept, linked to effective information processing, appears most capable of influencing students' procrastination tendencies. The paper suggests future research to explore new methods of measuring procrastination to unveil different associations with non-cognitive abilities potentially.

This paper focuses on estimating expert-specific characteristics and skills of art drawing, with use of figure tracing log data of pen strokes. In order to verify hypothesis, the authors acquired stroke data of simple figure drawing with use of Tablet PCs and digital pens. Afterwards, we compared the log data of novice learners with one of experts. As a result, we could not find significance between novices and experts in 8 target parameters. However, we found some tendencies of experts. These tendencies imply some training methods in art education.

In this study, we have focused on students’ peer assessment and analyzed evaluation behavior using data from the evaluation process. Peer assessments by students are problematic in terms of reliability and validity. Many previous studies have discussed the reliability or validity of peer assessment, based on the evaluation scores of the peer assessment. However, the “Evaluation Process”, that is, who, when, and which items were evaluated in what order, has not been studied. For this issue, in this research, we have proposed to acquire the “Evaluation Process” data in peer assessment and to analyze and visualize the students’ “Evaluation Behavior”. As a preliminary result, this study identified a range of characteristic evaluation behaviors, indicating the possibility that each student might have a unique style of evaluation and that there are students who do not take evaluation seriously. We expect that we will be able to estimate the students’ motivation on the peer assessment or evaluation ability, and also to improve the design of the peer assessment form or the conditions of the peer assessment based on the “Evaluation Behavior”.

This paper focused on academic procrastination by comparing students’ self-awareness of academic procrastination with their actual learning activity. We used questionnaires to measure students’ self-awareness of academic procrastination and LMS (Learning Management System) learning histories to measure their actual learning activities. The results from these comparisons indicate that the participants who do not recognize their procrastination habits tend to actually postpone beginning assigned tasks.

This study proposes a method to visualize utterance transition in a face-to-face group discussion using mobile devices. In a group discussion, it is difficult for an instructor to monitor many groups simultaneously, and there have been some preceding studies on finding methods to monitor learners. However, these methods require special equipment. To avoid this, we proposed to utilize the microphones in learners’ existing mobile devices to acquire sound data. Our method does not require special equipment to acquire data, as the program to acquire data runs via the learner’s web browser. We conducted a preliminary experiment to visualize utterance transition in a group discussion using our programs. The result indicated that we succeeded in visualizing utterance transition. The visualization diagram indicates participants’ frequency of communication with each other.

In this paper the authors propose a method and a system to support CSCL discussion with use of a developed function to emphasize the main sentence of each utterance. Generally, CSCL discussion environment has a difficulty to read huge volume of many utterances. The authors propose a function to provide two parts of input text fields, one is for main sentence of conclusion of an utterance, the other is for details or justifications of the utterance. At the time of representation, the proposing system first shows a list of main sentences. When members want to see details of an utterance, he or she clicks a link attached to the target main sentence. With use of the proposed function, a member of CSCL discussion will become easy to grasp a big picture of a discussion. It is expected to provide deep understanding of discussion and prompt to write meaningful utterances on CSCL. In order to verify an effect of the proposing system, the authors conducted a controlled experiment. The result shows that members of a target group tend to use various types of utterance roles rather than ones of a control group. From this result, the proposing system is thought to provides a CSCL environment for deeper understanding of discussion and utterances.

This paper shows typical functions required on electronic textbooks to be adopted in various countries, trial implementation of these functions, and their verification of representation and behavior in six e-book platforms. First, the authors extracted the functions by checking preceding researches and investigations. The result contains 52 items, including 7 categories of “authentication”, “copyright”, “contents representation”, “related information”, “additional information by learners”, “learning support”, and “restriction of contents and platforms”. Next, these functions were implemented with ePub3 format e-books. ePub3 is going to be one of de jure standard format of e-books. Also, contents representation and behavior of the result ePub e-books were verified on 6 types of e-book platforms on operating systems of iOS, Android, Windows, and Kindle Linux. The verification result shows that iBooks3 on iOS worked best among the 6 e-book readers. Also it shows that many e-book readers support only representation of ePub2 files, while HTML5, JavaScript, and Web API are not supported yet.

This paper proposes a three-dimensional motion capture and feedback system for flying disc learners with use of Kinect device. Compared with conventional 3-D motion capture systems, Kinect has advantages of cost merit, easy system development and operation. The proposing system captures learners’ body movement, checks their skeleton positions in pre-motion/motion/post-motion in several aspects, and displays feedback messages to improve their motions. A novice learner of flying disc is trained to keep arm movement in steady height, to twist the waist, and to stretch the elbow according to the waist angle. A result of controlled experiment shows that the proposing system is effective for beginners to improve their movements.

This paper proposes a function to restrict undesired utterance roles on CSCL, in order to accelerate better discussion. The authors found that CSCL discussion often falls into stagnated and distracted situation when continuing utterances have same utterance role. To avoid this situation, the proposing system monitors the utterance roles attached by learners, finds continuity of utterances with the same role, and prevents to use the target role for the next utterance upload. Result of controlled experiment shows that the proposing function works well, and learners tend to refer more preceding utterances.

Web services based e-learning architecture is proposed, in which various types of functionally distributed servers communicate each other and share learning-related information. These servers are assigned functions of archiving information directory, learning contents, learner information, and learning sequence of contents. On this architecture, the authors designed a function to modify sequence of learning materials automatically due to learner's learning style. This function provides learner-adapted contents, which is incapable of conventional e-learning architecture

Metadata developments are common in standardization activities, not only for learning technology, but all areas of electronic information representation. However, development itself is not the final goal from a practical point of view. Our research project is developing metadata to represent, record and reuse collaborative learning (CL) activity. There are many alternatives and combinations of representation frameworks for CL metadata. The selection of the framework depends on the aim and the goal of metadata development. If the goal is focused on representing pedagogical aspects of CL, one should choose a different description framework from those discussed in standardization activities.

The authors present the Triadic Domain Model (TDM)-based system development environment. The main purpose is to integrate system specification, system design and system implementation of a software system using domain specific properties. TDM consists of a domain problem model, domain product model and domain process model.>

A software prototyping environment called TransObj (TRANSaction and OBJect) is used for designing real-time Transaction-based Concurrent Software Systems (TCSS). In a TCSS design process, a software designer should perform both functional design and performance design. The designer should change his design view from a transaction-based paradigm to an object-based paradigm during the TCSS design process. Recognition of re-entrant functional objects and serially reusable functional objects in the TCSS should be required. TransObj includes the Stepwise Prototyping Method (SPM), and two SPM-based tools: Prolog-based TransObj (P-TransObj) and GPSS-based TransObj (G-TransObj). SPM enables the designer to advance both functional design and performance design for the TCSS prototype as controling the change of design view paradigms. P-TransObj mainly checks the prototype in a microscopic view on a personal computer. G-TransObj mainly checks the same prototype with a longer time span on a large-scale computer.