Department 3

In both classes of moral education and special activities, group problem-solving type learning is provided. Activities that utilize basic, cognitive, and social skills and all abilities of personality traits that should be fostered in the new Course of Study are conducted. These extracurricular activities (moral education became a subject only in 2015) include numerous elements that those who play leading roles in the world of 21st century must learn. Nonetheless, because of its positioning as extracurricular, learning there is not subject to evaluation. It was difficult to understand what competencies were fostered in these activities and to guide them to the improvement of educational content and methods.

Therefore Department 3 develops methods that appropriately evaluate what abilities are acquired through extracurricular activities in ‘moral education’ and ‘special activities,’ which have been positioned as extracurricular and for which evaluation methods have not been fully established. Evaluation will be made mainly for character traits such as citizenship, morality, and responsibility.

To be more specific, we regard evaluation methods for ‘moral education’, ‘special activities,’ and ‘Period for Integrated Studies,’ as emphasizing the development of character traits. For that purpose, we first scrutinize what abilities are considered to be fostered in each activity, seeking the opinions of experts. After that, we consider the evaluation method for each ability, with reference to the results of Competency Evaluation Study conducted by Department 2 (e.g. a rubric to evaluate children’s behavior in actual activities). In so doing, we propose not common evaluation methods for each of ‘moral education’ and ‘special activities,’ but evaluation methods tailored to each trait.

With regard to the evaluation methods developed, we examine the reliability and validity through accordance with self-evaluation by children and parents and the analysis of the consistency among multiple evaluators. When developing evaluation methods, we do so with emphasis on the availability to actual teachers at school sites.