Review of Master's Theses in the Field of Social Studies Education between 2008 and 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the general trends of master dissertations written in Social Studies Education and performed in 2008-2014 years in terms of thematic and methodology. Document review was performed in study. The study group was included in all the master's thesis recorded at thesis database of Higher Education Council established in Turkey. Through this database, we obtained 423 theses to open access for the readers. For data analysis, descriptive analysis was used. Accordingly, firstly, 423 master thesis were classified into themes by study areas regarding social studies. Then, methodological processes such as the research method, the audience, the statistical and qualitative data analysis methods, and the studies of validity and reliability used in research were examined using frequency and percentile. The findings of this study indicate that the theme most studied is about Teaching Practices; the research method most used is survey method; as the audience, theses mostly rely on middle school students. It reveals also an evidence that expert opinion was employed for validation and Cronbach alpha coefficient was calculated for reliability at most. Furthermore, findings display that researchers have used Parametric Difference Tests in their master thesis.