With the increase in master's degree enrollment in China, ensuring the realization of value-added research skills of master's degree students with limited educational resources has become an urgent problem. We developed hypotheses and tested the mediating effect of academic passion (AP) in the role of training environment satisfaction (TES) on research skill increment (RSI) and the moderating role of academic self-efficacy (ASE) using the perspective of Research Training Environment Theory (RTE). We used a structured questionnaire to collect responses from 911 master's students from universities in central China, including 458 males (50.27%) and 453 females (49.73%), and 66.41% of the subjects were between the ages of 23 and 26. Our findings indicate that TES significantly impacts RSI and can influence RSI via a partially mediated effect of AP. In addition, we determined the moderating effect of ASE between the effects of the three variables. Based on RTE theory, we introduced the concept of value-add assessment and combined the two to realize the expansion of RTE theory. This study has implications for administrators and individuals in graduate education. It can help administrators make changes to the management model or methods of graduate education, as well as provide some inspiration for developing and improving master's students' research skills.