Benesse Holdings (Japan)

The primary goal of dementia care is well-being. As people with dementia have complex problems and symptoms in many domains, interventions should be individualized and should consider the person overall.1 For such care to improve the well-being of people with dementia, person-centered care (PCC) is essential.2 However, providing PCC is sometimes tricky, particularly for inexperienced care staff. To provide individualized care, staff should know the person altogether, grasp their condition at the moment precisely, and take action to support them to get closer to what they want to be. Staff find it most challenging to cope with people with dementia when they are aggressive/hostile, have little control over their problematic behavior, are stubborn/resistive, deliberately difficult, and unpredictable.3 Improvement of dementia care standards enhances the quality of life of people with dementia, particularly in geriatric health service facilities.4 In addition, PCC is beneficial for people with dementia and potentially good for care staff.5 To facilitate professional caregivers to take action toward PCC, we have collected effective and focused caregiving practices used in Japan's Benesse Style Care (BSC) nursing homes and categorized their keys to success. Each key was described using pattern language, recognized as critical in conveying tacit knowledge.6 An example is shown in Figure 1. The descriptions were written as concretely as possible in plain and friendly language, so that even inexperienced care staff would understand and feel like they could do it. Through the revision of a pilot version, the Dementia Care Method® titled “Words to create a world for living together with you” has been developed. Forty methods are classified and divided into seven things to keep in mind in dementia care: “know their personality,” “move their mind,” “help them move their body,” “expand their world,” “help each other,” “get them in shape,” and “help them face the risks.” The Dementia Care Method® was provided to all the BSC nursing homes as booklets and cards to support care practices. Care staff in each nursing home were encouraged to use the Dementia Care Method® for daily care. Several months after providing the methods, a survey of practices of the Dementia Care Method® showed that half of the survey participants employed the methods and felt that they were providing essential dementia care. Care staff with <1 year of experience have shown a similar tendency. However, some had difficulties in putting it into practice.7 To facilitate the practice of the Dementia Care Method®, we have started an online training course. Specifically, a 1-h online training course was developed to introduce the outline and use cases promoting the technique. The care staff of BSC nursing homes participated in the training voluntarily. To verify the effect of the online training course on the Dementia Care Method®, we asked the participants to respond to a questionnaire after voluntarily taking the online training course. Of 1246 participants, 782 answered the questionnaire. About 95.7% said that they would like to try this method. The method suited their purposes in addressing current caregiving issues. In addition, they perceived the technique to be easy and believed that it could be applied to specific care recipients or situations. In contrast, the participants were concerned about whether they could involve their colleagues, whether they will have enough time to use the method, and apply it in a “correct” manner. Additional use cases and tips were provided to help them overcome such anxiety. The online training course motivated the participants to put the Dementia Care Method® into use. As a result, more residents have begun sharing their thoughts and requests with the care staff, enabling them to support residents in realizing their desires and preferences. For instance, one resident who was demotivated, now enjoys growing vegetables, and has even started a workout routine. Another resident who was usually bored at the nursing home and frequently expressed a desire to return home is now actively engaging in various housework activities and enjoying life with fellow residents. The impact can be evaluated through observing changes in the frequency of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) and the content of daily reports. Similar cases have been gradually increasing, indicating that care recipients' quality of life has improved. Moreover, some utilization cases of BSC nursing homes have been presented at conferences.8, 9 Currently, the Japanese version of the Dementia Care Method® is available at https://www.benesse-style-care.co.jp/method03/. An English version will be available shortly and we will continue to promote the Dementia Care Method®. The author declares no conflict of interest. Research data are not shared.

Japanese English education reform continues to falter, and the same is true of university English education. However, amidst these circumstances, transmission-oriented English education is gaining attention as a methodological approach to English language educational reform. Transmission-oriented English education, in which the authors are also engaged, is a model for reform that shifts the emphasis from the traditional reception-based approach in English education to a more communicative, active learning approach. However, while these educational practices have shown results in terms of excitement in the classroom and subjective satisfaction among learners, there is a lack of objective proof, and the accumulation of research to verify the results objectively is an urgent need. In this paper, we examine the results of the GTEC (Global Test of English Communication)-Academic and TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication), which objectively measure English proficiency, and the GPS (Global Proficiency Skills)-Academic, which objectively measures basic social competencies, in two different groups of participants to determine whether the presence or absence of transmission-oriented English education has contributed to the growth of abilities ranging from subsets of English skills to socially necessary competencies by utilizing statistical verification. One interesting result was that the experimental group that took transmission-oriented English education for one year scored significantly higher in English writing than the group that did not, and since there were no statistically significant differences in any of the other components of English proficiency, we concluded that this could be considered an outcome of transmission-oriented English education.

The Yes/No vocabulary test has some methodological advantages compared with the commonly used multiple-choice vocabulary test. To clarify the nature of both tests, we conducted two surveys. Participants ranged from high school students to adults in their 60s. We examined the relationships between these two vocabulary tests and reading activity, which is a major source of vocabulary learning. We found an intermediary relationship: familiarity with reading directly predicts known rates on the Yes/No test, and the known rate predicts correct answer rates on the multiple-choice test. Based on this result, we concluded that the Yes/No test reflects a “rough understanding of the meaning of words,” which is the initial vocabulary learning effect of reading. Thus, the effect of reading activities can be detected more sensitively by the Yes/No test. The results also suggest that the multiple-choice test reflects a “detailed understanding of the meaning of words” that precedes the rough understanding of meaning.