Abstract:

All Official Masters end with the elaboration and presentation of a final research project. Thus, every student should be oriented and informed about the guidelines and the way he/she should carry out the work.
This paper focuses on the Official Masters of Social Sciences with the aim of improving the method they apply and to learn from the experience of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV) and the University of Applied Sciences of Ansbach (Germany), as well as other Spanish and foreign universities.
Master Teaching programs are supposed to look on the one hand for an advanced training orientated academic or professional specialization and, on the other hand, on promoting the introduction of research work. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia's regulation states that Post Graduate programs should be oriented to advance, specialized and multidisciplinary learning in the area of academic, research and professional training. These statements make clear that students should be trained in research; however, some evidences have been provided from the Social Sciences Masters that teaching in Master level is more orientated to academic and professional fields while the research area is left further to Doctoral Programs.
Therefore, and although this experience bases only on these masters, some conclusions can be got from them, as well as about methodology, evaluation system and improvement issues. Our main objective is to spread the conclusions among the university community.
This work is part of the study developed by the MACMAP Team (Master and Posgraduate Methodologies) created as an EICE (Innovation and Quality Education Team) at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

Keywords:

Master Thesis, methodology guidelines.