Research Intent

Our research will focus on ways to enhance children’s abilities to build and maintain human relationships (including communication and teamwork skills) so that they can continue building and enhancing their careers throughout their lives. We also intend to create an item bank based on the testing and verification of field studies. The results of this research will help researchers and practitioners to find new assessment methods accommodating each individual’s developmental stage and various abilities, as well as develop classroom materials fostering children’s skills and abilities.

Dr. Atsushi Aikawa
Member, Board of Directors

My career in research has focused on how teachers can encourage children to develop their interpersonal skills and also has involved providing practical methods and materials for classroom use. Despite efforts made by many researchers and scholars, there is no established scientific methodology which we can use to measure children’s interpersonal skills.

If we can identify deficiencies in a child’s interpersonal skills, and to what degree, it then becomes much easier to treat them effectively. Furthermore, we can evaluate the effectiveness of such support and use these results to aid us in developing educational materials to improve children’s skills and abilities in general. As a member of the Board of Directors for CRET, I am hopeful that this institute will further the research on the measurement of children’s interpersonal skills in Japan, and will contribute to establishing methodologies that are recognized internationally.
http://www.u-gakugei.ac.jp/~aikawa/

Biography

Professor of Psychology at the National University Corporation, Tokyo Gakugei University(1993-present)
Ph.D in Psychology from Hiroshima University (1995)
Researcher, lecturer, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, University of Miyazaki (1983-1993)
Invited Scholar- Department of Psychology, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom (1989-1990)
Director of the Japanese Group Dynamics Association (2003-present), the Japanese Society of Social Psychology (2005-present), and the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology (2006-present)
Details are here.

Publications (titles have been translated)

• Techniques　for Interpersonal Relationships, Saiensu Sha,(2000)
• Overcoming the Death of Loved Ones, Daiwa Publishing, (2003)
• Social Skills Education in Junior High School, Tosho Bunnka, (2006)
• URL: http://www.u-gakugei.ac.jp/~aikawa/