High School General Course "Information" at Present and Introductory Education at University

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General subject area "Information Study" introduced into upper secondary schools in 2003 consists of three subjects "Information A", "Information B" and "Information C". It is, however, heard that schools devoting to the student education for entering universities give less attention to Information Study. Thus, to reconstruct curriculum at universities, the following investigations were carried out.1.Overall view of the Information Study from the number of textbooks adopted schools in nationwide2.Questionnaires conducted for upper secondary school students at pre-entrance guidance to university3.Interviews to Information Study teachersFrom these investigations, the following conclusions were derived.(1)Although 3/4 of schools in Japan are still adopting Information A, Information B and C are increasing.(2)Information Study should be offered to students at lower school year since the skills that students learn in Information Study are useful in other general subject areas. However, only … More 61% of 1st-year-students studied Information Study in nationwide average, and even less than 50% can be found in some prefectures. The number of PC-rooms and teachers of Information Study could be a barrier for pulling down to lower school year in future.(3)Although Information Study is a 2-credit course, approximately 20% of schools spend only 1-credit school hour. The National Curriculum Standards should be improved on the other hand since the present contents, particularly the practical exercises, in Information Study are not satisfactory for some high-level schools.(4)The practical exercise in class hours of Information Study is not effective for raising students' operational skills of computers, and thus, hours for exercises can be reduced.(5)Many school works carried out by Information Study teachers are not understood by colleagues in other subject areas and many prefectures do not employ teacher with only Information Study Teacher License. Thus, schools may face difficulties in future to keep the necessary number of teachers with Information Study Teacher License.(6)Equipments and Environments of IT have been substantially improved at most schools, but those are not being fully used.The introductory courses at universities related to Information Study can not be much discussed at present since the first graduates who had studied Information Study during upper secondary schools entered to universities only a month ago. In the present report, however, illustrated was a way to alter contents of an introductory information course at the author's university based upon objective data obtained in the present investigation. Furthermore, it was confirmed that such alternation was correct from data of questionnaires carried out for freshmen at the author's university. Less