In order to understand how learning occurs in children from different cultures, the learning profiles of Japanese and American children who ranged in age from 4 to 6 was examined, using the Iowa Early Learning Assessment Instrument (IELA). After the English instructions of the IELA were translated into Japanese the IELA was sent to Japan and was administered individually to 13 males and 12 females. Results were sent to the United States where the children's performance on five subtests of the IELA (seriation, visual motor, classification, vocabulary, and concepts) was compared with norms obtained in the IELA testing of American children. Results indicated that the Japanese average scores on the seriation and visual motor subtests were higher by more than one standard deviation than those of the American children and that the Japanese scores on the classification and concepts subtests were substantially above the American average. However, on the vocabulary subtest the Japanese scores were lower than the American, particularly among girls. These results are consistent with previous findings which showed Chinese and Japanese children performing higher in mathematics than their American counterparts. (Author/MP)