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to express both agreement and disagreement and elaborate on or respond to one
another’s responses much more frequently than American teachers. A mixed-ability
grouping arrangement called han is often used to promote pupils’ personal and social
development in Japanese classrooms. Pupils share school life in a certain han for
learning and other activities for several months (Duke, 1986). This familiarity among han
members is believed to be beneficial given that Goldberg et al.’s (1965) study suggested
that co-operation is better promoted in groups of consistent membership rather than
when children are grouped with new children.
One learning style using small groups to achieve common goals adopted in the USA is
called co-operative learning (Johnson et al. 1987). Group teaching is believed to
promote not only pupils’ cognitive competence but also their social competence. Pupils’
involvement in group-activities can promote their motivation, and sustain their effort and
concentration (Kyriacou et al., 1991). Group learning, which encourages an individual
pupil’s commitment as a component of a group (Johnson et al., 1992) and individual
effort (Slavin, 1983, 1991) is assumed to produce high achievement. Such learning
styles benefit all the children by improving their attainment, enhancing self-esteem, and
promoting better attitudes towards mathematics (Ofsted, 1995). However, other research
has suggested that the effect of co-operative learning on pupils’ achievement is
influenced by various factors, for instance, the characteristics of the pupil such as
gender (Sadker et al. 1985), group composition, and the quality of group interaction
(O’Donnell et al., 1992; Webb, 1982, 1989, 1992).
Individual teaching
As mentioned above, individual teaching is not popularly deployed in the Japanese
classroom. Individualism is, in Japan, interpreted as relating to personality, rather than to
the rights of individuals as secured by Article One of the education fundamental law
(1947) and expressed in the Fourth and Final Report on Education Reform written by the
National Council on Educational Reform in 1987. It is different from the Western view of
individuality whereby children should receive education according to individual
differences in abilities (Tsuneyoshi, R.K. 1991). Green (1998) explained that the relative
equality within Japanese schooling is due to historical factors such as the state-led
nation-building modernisation after the Meiji Restoration, the lack of social stratification
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