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Abstract: Curriculum has always been the main element in any educational system and a relatively large number of research has been carried out in this area. Using quantitative approach and document content analysis, this study investigates the methodologies applied in research on higher education curriculum. Among the existing literature, 30 studies from 13 journals that were carried out by Iranian researchers, and 30 studies from 14 credible journals carried out by foreign scholars were selected through purposeful sampling, and subsequently analyzed.  The results reveal that in foreign studies on curriculum, qualitative approach was dominant, employed in sixty percent of the studies. Within this portion, case studies and phenomenological approach with %50 and 37.5% were used most by the researchers. The study also found that quantitative approach was the dominant approach applied in Iranian studies (fifty percent), among which survey methodology was the most widely used (%85.8). Moreover, this study indicates that both Iranian and foreign research are moving from quantitative to qualitative and mixed research, although this trend is stronger in foreign research.  

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Current study has been implemented with the aim of quality evaluation of research methodological skills of master students in human science disciplines in Tehran's public Universities. In qualitative section, by using purposeful and snow-ball sampling, experts in field of teaching methodology were interviewed. By using content analysis and coding procedure and also the syllabuses of the research methods and statistic courses, 35 important skills were indentified. In quantitative section, based on identified skills a valid and reliable questionnaire was developed and completed by 270 students. First, by implementing exploratory factor analysis, all skills were decreased into 27 skills and 4 factors (designing, practical, analytical and writing skills) were indentified. In the second stage, confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the measurement model of latent variable has good fit with observed data. In the next stage the results of Chi-squared test indicated that students have meaningful evaluation from skills. They evaluated their skills lower than average. Also the results of Friedman test have meaningfully ranked skills in each dimension. The results of ranked skills indicate that "selecting an appropriate title for doing research", "using electronic resource and scientific database", "interpreting the outputs of analyzed data", and "writing an article from the results of conducted research" have the lowest rank in each dimension. Generally, result of this study indicates weakness in needed research skills among human sciences master students of Tehran's public Universities.