Attending a Sports Club Can Help Prevent Visual Impairment Caused by Cram School in Elementary School Children in Japan

Longer durations for near-work activities, such as studying, worsen eyesight. In contrast, outdoor exercise is effective in reducing the risk of developing myopia. Despite these findings, however, the interaction between studying and exercise in eyesight has not been quantitatively evaluated. Moreover, since there is a culture of attending lessons in Japan, it is important to investigate the relationship between elementary school activities, such as cram schools or sports clubs, and vision. Therefore, in this study, we examined whether attending cram schools and/or sports clubs is associated with the use of glasses among elementary school students. We conducted a survey among 7419 elementary school students in Tokyo, Japan using a food education questionnaire. A logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between wearing glasses, an objective variable, and attending sports clubs and cram schools. Sex and school year were considered confounding factors. The results of this study showed that students who attended only sports clubs were more likely to be categorized into the “not wearing glasses” group (p = 0.03, OR = 1.45), whereas those who attended only cram schools were more likely to be categorized into the “wearing glasses” group (p = 0.008, OR = 0.67). In addition, students who attended both cram schools and sports clubs were more likely to be categorized into the “not wearing glasses” group than those who only attended cram schools (p = 0.28, OR = 0.85). Our findings indicate that attending not only cram schools but also sports clubs may prevent deterioration of eyesight. Parents and health care providers need to take these findings into account in order to prevent visual impairment in children.

A Corpus-based Study of Vocabulary in the New Concept English Textbook Series

Growing a large vocabulary is one of the most important tasks of language learners and yet research reports on low levels of lexical knowledge for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. In EFL contexts, textbooks are a vital source of exposure to English and the words that are worth learning. The New Concept English textbook series is widely used in China by large numbers of learners in secondary schools and cram schools, and in preparation for university studies. This study finds that while learners will encounter mostly high-frequency vocabulary in these books, they will need to know between 3000 and 6000 word families to cope with these texts, and Book 4 requires 1000 more word families than Book 3. Science-related texts in the books contribute to the vocabulary load because they contain a large proportion of low-frequency words used only once and have a higher vocabulary load than humanities texts. There are opportunities for learning mid-frequency vocabulary in these textbooks. Limitations of current research and suggestions for future research are also presented.

The Impact of English Learning Motivation and Attitude on Well-Being: Cram School Students in Taiwan

As English is a global language, it is important for students to learn it effectively and efficiently. Learning English from English cram schools is very popular in Taiwan. Most students have studied in English cram schools for some period of time of their English learning experience. The present study concerns about how English cram school learners’ English learning attitudes related to their learning motivation and learning well-being in Taiwan. By using the quantitative research methodology, an empirical research model has been proposed and 277 valid questionnaires were collected. The research results show that learning motivation has a significant impact on learning attitude and learning well-being. Then, the English learning attitude provides mediated effects between learning motivation and well-being. Learning attitude is the key to English learning well-being. Furthermore, a participant’s gender has a significant moderating effect between learning intrinsic motivation and attitude. According to research findings, some suggestions such as using e-learning tools were provided for teachers and educators of the cram schools in Taiwan.

Brand Image and Service Quality on Purchase Intentions: Evidence from the Chain Cram Schools in Taiwan

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of brand image and service quality on consumer purchase intention from the perspective of the Taiwan cram school industry. The research involved a questionnaire survey of parent consumers of primary school pupils attending cram schools. A 37-item, five-point Likert scale questionnaire was used to collect the data. From the total sample size, 430 responses representing 84.15 percent were found useable for analysis. The data were then analyzed using the SPSS software for reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, factor analysis, independent sample t-test, One Way Analysis of Variance, Pearson product-moment correlation, and regression analysis. The results indicate that both brand image and service quality are significantly positively correlated with purchase intention, and that service quality as compared to the brand image is more positively related to purchase intention. Additionally, this study finds evidence that both brand image and service quality are significantly positively predictive of purchase intention.

Baselines for Energy Use and Carbon Emission Intensities in Hellenic Nonresidential Buildings

This work exploits data from 30,000 energy performance certificates of whole nonresidential (NR) buildings in Greece. The available information is analyzed for 30 different NR building uses (e.g., hotels, schools, sports facilities, hospitals, retails, offices) and four main services (space heating, space cooling, domestic hot water and lighting). Data are screened in order to exclude outliers and checked for consistency with the Hellenic NR building stock. The average energy use and CO2 emission intensities for all building uses are calculated, as well as the respective energy ratings in order to gain a better understanding of the NR sector. Finally, in an attempt to determine whether these values are representative for the various Hellenic NR building uses, their temporal evolution is investigated. The average primary energy use intensity is 448.0 kWh/m2 for all NR buildings, while the CO2 emissions reach 147.5 kgCO2/m2. The derived energy baselines reveal that indoor sports halls/swimming pools have the highest energy use, while private cram schools/conservatories have the lowest, due to their operational patterns. Generally, from the four services taken into account, lighting is the most energy consuming, followed by cooling, heating and finally domestic hot water. For a total of 11 building uses, more data from the certificates will be necessary for deriving representative baselines, but, when it comes to buildings categories, more data are required.

Chapter 10: Eikaiwa vs. juku: The affordances and constraints of each context

​In this chapter, Ewen MacDonald compares eikaiwa and juku (cram schools), arguably the two most overlooked contexts in TESOL research in Japan. Having simultaneously worked in both contexts, he relates the affordances and constraints he experienced in each classroom and explores the ways in which he feels his experiences in eikaiwa and juku contributed to his evolving teacher identity.

Design of a Metrics for Teaching Quality on Cram Schools Business

Due to the pressure of fierce competition, many parents worry about their children being unable to compete with their peers. Besides the regular school class, they have engaged their kids at the cram school in order to strengthen the performance of their academic or creative art, so they might have a better foundation. The cram school business thus becomes a unique and prosperous educational business. Due to the low entry barrier, many companies have joining this business. However, the declining birth rate makes cram school business facing decreasing students number in recent years. Therefore, developing effective practices to improve students retention rate and to improve competitive advantages are becoming critical for managers of cram schools. The first step to change the cram school competition environment from cost-driven to quality-driven is to establish a way to measure the teaching quality — as there is no metrics during the past few decades in this domain. This work proposes a metrics based on the theory developed by Marsh and elaborated their idea to design a teaching quality assessment mechanism. Experts in academia and cram schools were interviewed to revise the proposed framework and the associated weighted values of elements in all dimensions of the framework were further calculated using Analytic Network Process (ANP) process. Questionnaires were distributed to representative teachers and supervisors in the cram school to justify the proposed metrics. The results show that this proposed metrics are valuable to the managers and could be used to improve students retention rate.