Non-University Higher Education, and Qualification Framework

本研究以专科学校和专科学校为研究对象，从“教育控制力”、“教育方法论”和“教育目标”三个角度，对非大学高等教育领域的专科和专科教育项目的特点进行了研究。我们的目的是用职业教育导向的方法和大学的学术导向的方法进行实证对比，揭示他们的特长。此外，作为政策科学研究，我们探索了国家资格框架的可能性，以改善社会对非大学教育系统及其质量保证的认识。此外，我们还对国外的非大学高等教育机构进行了实地考察。在本研究开始时，我们创建了四个分类，包括“国家许可证部门”、“工业部门”、“商业和商业部门”和“设计、内容和其他部门”。我们对国内外进行了更多的实地调查，揭示了它们在课程设置上的共同点和差异化趋势。其次，在调查结果的基础上，对全国专科院校和职业培训学院的师资队伍和机构进行了调查。通过这次调查，我们明确了职业实践、学术活动、学历和管理能力等各种能力的形成。我们发现每种类型的机构都有独特的运作风格。在研究期间，我们在每个研究阶段都举办了几次国际研讨会，如起点、中点和结束点，并有机会通过日本高等教育研究协会的学术会议等形式介绍我们的研究成果。

This research focused on Junior colleges and professional training colleges as non-university higher education sectors and researched the characteristics of their educational programs with three perspectives, namely “control of education”, “methodology of education” and “goals of education”. We aimed to reveal their specialties with vocational education-oriented approach empirically in contrast with academic-oriented one in universities. Moreover, as policy scientific research we searched the possibilities of national qualifications frameworks in order to improvesocial cognition for non-university education system and their quality assurance. Further, we conducted field studies of non-university higher education institutions abroad. On commencement of this research, we have created four classifications including the “national license sector”, the “industrial sector”, the “commerce and business sector” and the “design, contents and others sector”. We did more field surveys domestic and abroad and revealed their mutual aspects and differentiated trends of their curriculum. Secondly, based on these results we surveyed teaching staff and institutions of junior colleges and professional training colleges nationwide. Through this survey, we clarified the formation of various competencies such as excellence in vocational practice, academic activities, educational qualification and management ability. We found unique operational style of each type of institution. Finally, we did graduate survey focusing their careers and evaluating their graduating colleges.During this research period we held several international seminars at each research stage such as kickoff point, a halfway point and closing points and also had opportunities to present our research results through academic meetings of Japan Association of Higher Education Research and so on.