Education

Many children feel stressed when they need to take exams. But exam anxiety can affect everyone, from children to adults. It can even damage the mental health of students who receive very high marks. It can also negatively affect students who are less successful, for example, children with special needs and children who are anxious in general. Sometimes children are worried because their parents set goals that are too high for them.

The Harvard Center for the Developing Child says that some amount of stress can be good for children’s development. It helps them to learn how to cope with difficult situations. But it is important for parents to remember that children are still only learning how to deal with stress. Too much stress can be very negative. 

Scientists say that a child learns how to manage stressful situations quicker and better if there is a lot of support from parents or other adults. 
 

A Japanese medical school has been accused of manipulating the test scores of female applicants for years to artificially depress the number of women in the student body, a scandal that has triggered sharp criticism.

The revelations have highlighted institutional barriers that women in Japan still face as they pursue work in fields that have long been dominated by men.

Tokyo Medical University reduced the test scores of women to keep their numbers at about 30 percent of entering classes. For the 2018 school year, 8.8 percent of men and 2.9 percent of women were accepted, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

The newspaper quoted an unnamed source as saying that school administrators justified the practice out of the belief that women were more likely to drop out of the profession after marriage or childbirth.

More and more elementary school teachers in Japan are turning to English language schools with native speakers, as they seek to gain confidence in teaching the language before it is formally added to their curricula in the academic year starting April 2020.

Many teachers admit to lacking confidence in their English, in areas from vocabulary to grammar, expressiveness and pronunciation. Elementary school teachers say they are afraid of teaching their students “the wrong thing.”

In 2011 Japan made English compulsory for fifth- and sixth-graders as part of their extra-curricular “foreign language activities.” Last year the guidelines were further revised to start English education from the third grade as part of foreign language teaching, and make English a formal subject from fifth grade, starting in 2020, in an effort to enhance the nation’s global competitiveness.