This paper replicates models developed by previous research to study the effects of graduate education on new graduates' initial employment in the Japanese labor market. If education is the best investment for an individual's economic success, then graduate degrees are expected to provide an individual with higher-earning job opportunities.…

We are becoming more and more aware of the marks our human existence is leaving on our global environment: the Anthropocene as discourse of that awareness is turning into a living and lived-in reality. I argue that such discourse cannot remain the purview of the natural and social sciences alone: culture must be recognized in its pivotal role of…

Purpose: This study was conducted to understand students' achievements in learning and to improve the overall curriculum of the first-year experience course. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, a series of questionnaire-based surveys were conducted on students enrolled in the Introductory Seminar for Policy Science, a mandatory first-year…

This paper presents the importance of the visual expression of factor decomposition in regression analysis, which is particularly worthwhile for undergraduate students whose majors are not mathematics but social science. The conventional purpose of regression analysis is to examine specific hypotheses empirically. In particular, the statistical…

The development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its associated tools has revolutionised the learning and use of foreign languages (L2). One such tool is machine translation (MT), which has become increasingly popular among university students worldwide, spurring research on MT use in L2 writing. However, previous research has…

Polymathy may be defined as the productive pursuit of multiple endeavors, simultaneously or serially, across a lifetime. As such, polymathic breadth of interest across knowledge domains characterizes Nobel laureates in the sciences, literature, economics, and peace, though interest patterns vary between groups. Economics laureates, like science…

Given the perceived imbalance in resource allocation and the recognized disparities in degree completion rates across academic disciplines in Japan's higher education system, this study explores the perceptions and experiences of graduate students through a comparison between graduate students in Humanities and Social Sciences and those in…

Undergraduate research in Japan, called graduation research (GR), is comparable to that in other countries and is defined here as a final-year curricular activity that completes undergraduate study. This article aims to elucidate GR to contribute to the scholarship of undergraduate research from an international perspective. The main findings…

Liberal education has been a target of political discourse in many countries, and Japan is no exception. In Japanese higher education, there are three types of institutions: national public, local public, and private. In June 2015, Japan's minister of education, Hakubun Shimomura, called upon the country's national universities to take…

In classroom management, it is well-known that students' mental states are strongly related to classroom conditions. There are many ways to describe human behavior in mathematical modeling in sociology. In social science, a model to describe human behavior has been developed by an analogy with the ferromagnetic spin model in statistical physics.…

Purpose: This study introduces the idea of "Kyouzai Kenkyuu" and examines its potentiality as a conceptual tool to point to the curriculum design process with a case of social science education. By doing so, this study can contribute to expanding the target of reflection from the practices "inside" classrooms toward the…

The increase in the internationalization of universities has been accompanied by an increase in multiculturalism in classrooms. Due to this situation, with the objective of knowing the conceptions of university professors around pluricultural competence and attending to the connection with their positioning in relation to the models of…

This paper examines shifts in the knowledge production policy agenda at Japanese research universities -- a transition from discipline-based academic tradition towards interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production -- through a case study of a leading interdisciplinary research institute. We examine this transition through the case of Tohoku…

"New Directions of STEM Research and Learning in the World Ranking Movement: A Comparative Perspective" illustrates new directions of STEM higher education from the perspective of twenty-first century types of learning outcomes and focuses on need for developing an interdisciplinary approach to STEM higher education reform. It provides…

In 2009, the Japanese government launched the Global 30 (G30) Project, a new initiative to internationalize universities. Selected universities had to create English-medium degree programs at undergraduate level in order to stimulate "internationalization at home." The G30 Project represented a major shift in the focus of…