Subject-Specific Characteristic Analysis：Characterizing Cognitive Profiles Across School Subjects Based on Principal Components

This study reanalyzed data from a previous principal component analysis (PCA) of Japanese university students’ preferences for 20 school subjects to clarify how each subject is perceived. The original study extracted 20 principal components, including contrasts between memorization and theory-based learning (PC1), natural sciences and humanities/social sciences (PC2), as well as dimensions such as everyday relevance, creativity, external-world orientation, visual understanding, conceptual design, fundamentality, artificiality, learning-strategy clarity, and entrance-examination selectivity.In the present analysis, the original plots were approximately digitized and linearly normalized within each principal component to relative scores ranging from −100 to +100. These scores were then classified into five levels from strongly negative to strongly positive. Using these quantitative profiles, each subject was characterized in terms of (1) its overall perceived image, (2) associated learning style, (3) learner characteristics linked to success, (4) likely areas of difficulty, and (5) relative differences from other subjects. This subject-level reconstruction provides a more interpretable account of how students cognitively differentiate academic subjects.