Donald Super's Contribution to Career Guidance and Counselling in Japan

Dr Donald Super's contributions to career guidance and counselling in Japan are summarised within the framework of his career development theory from 1960 to 1990. The first part is related to the theoretical frame of reference of career guidance in the secondary school. The second is focused on developing a theoretical and practical basis for career counselling for the adult population. It is concluded that the importance of his approach has increased in the changing Japanese society.     

Career development and mental health

Conclusion While the extent of linkages and the patterning of the relationships between career development and mental health is yet to be fully studied and articulated, this paper has argued that such connections do exist. Given such a premise, it has been contended that career counseling does serve as a therapeutic modality as it provides dislocated, unhappy, maladjusted or underemployed workers information, support, encouragement, and skills that increase personal competence, facilitate hope, and reduce feelings of being a social isolate of little worth or dignity. Skill building or psychoeducational approaches can deal directly with such matters as anger management, assertiveness, planfulness, interpersonal competence, openness to constructive supervision. These are matters of educating people for choice, for purpose, and for development, approaches which help people to create reality and make meaning for themselves within the context of work and career. As such they are therapeutic ways of engendering mental health.     

Teachers developing assessment for learning: impact on student achievement

While it is generally acknowledged that increased use of formative assessment (or assessment for learning) leads to higher quality learning, it is often claimed that the pressure in schools to improve the results achieved by students in externally‐set tests and examinations precludes its use. This paper reports on the achievement of secondary school students who worked in classrooms where teachers made time to develop formative assessment strategies. A total of 24 teachers (2 science and 2 mathematics teachers, in each of six schools in two LEAs) were supported over a six‐month period in exploring and planning their approach to formative assessment, and then, beginning in September 1999, the teachers put these plans into action with selected classes. In order to compute effect sizes, a measure of prior attainment and at least one comparison group was established for each class (typically either an equivalent class taught in the previous year by the same teacher, or a parallel class taught by another teacher). The mean effect size in favour of the intervention was 0.32.