Secretariat-General of the Higher Education Council, Kingdom of Bahrain.

Higher education plays an essential role in society by creating new knowledge, transmitting it to students and fostering innovation. Research-based education has lately received increasing interest both among researchers in higher education and in public discussion. The aim of this paper is to develop a thorough understanding of teacher education reform in Japan and its relation to the research development process. To identify whether Japanese teachers are equipped with the conceptual understanding and methodological skills to conduct research, field visits are carried out to some schools and higher education institutions; some content analysis of materials related to their Teacher Education Programs are conducted; twenty-five people (ten professionals, professors, and policy makers, five teachers, and ten students) are interviewed. Quantitative survey data as well as in-depth qualitative data are collected from survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews over a period of two months. This research attempts to discuss the research policies, strategies and practices in graduate schools of teacher education and the contributions of research in developing high quality teaching. Findings of this research is expected to make research-informed contributions to contemporary issues, initiatives and reforms in Japanese higher education, and will at least serve to initiate a debate about research-based teacher education and contribute to the decisions that need to be made regarding the future of higher education in Japan