A thematic and methodological analysis of masters dissertations in the field of measurament and evaluation in education

The purpose of the study is to analyze the dissertations in the field of measurement and evaluation in education in terms of thematic and methodological view. The study involves all masters dissertations published and available in the measurement and evaluation field, in total, there are 166 dissertations. To analyze the dissertations, the measurement designed by the researcher has been used. Initially, from which dimensions to analyze the dissertations has been defined after scrutinizing the literature in this field. Then, the dissertations has been analyzed in terms of the university in which it was studied, the year of publication, the position of the supervisor, subject-field of, the key words, the approach which is used, the method of sampling and research group, type of the samples, validity and reliability, tool for gathering data, analyzing the data, statistic program which is used and lastly the source of the data in the dissertations. In order to make sure that the research is reliable, interscorer reliability has been calculated. Over all the data recorded, percentage and frequency of the items has also been calculated. According to the findings, the most research has been done in 2011 and 2012, thesis advisors are mostly the instructors, researches are commonly designed in the model of 'scanning', 63,86 percent of the dissertations has been conducted over the 'study group', mostly used methods are the random and stratified sampling methods, ın 80,72 percent of the researches, type of data sampling is students among which 78,92 percent is primary, secondary and high school students and 2,41 percent of them are post graduate students. It is apparently seen that the number of the postgraduate students is too low. In addition, content validity and construct validity have been taken into consideration in the dissertations and an expert of the field has frequently been consulted. Mostly used reliability methods are Cronbach Alpha and KR-20. As a tool for gathering data, survey, scale, form and success tests have been used. Besides mostly used statistic programme is SPSS and Microsoft Excel, in 63,8 percent of the dissertations the data has been gathered by the researcher. Keywords: measurement and evaluation in education, thematic and methodological analysis, master dissertations