What is the standard way to include introduction and references parts to a masters thesis?
You mix up two things: Thesis introduction and Chapter introduction.

From what I observe, every thesis has to have an introduction. It makes sense after all: You need to introduce the topic of the thesis etc. You can't simply start a math thesis by Theorem. For all X ... -- you need to start somewhere, and that's the thesis introduction.

The chapter introduction is a nice thing to do, and there are more options. It can be a short text before the first section, a separate section, some people even provide short (3-or-so-sentence) abstracts to each chapter. However, this is mostly part of your writing style, and it can't be so much enforced (well, it can, but that is IMHO ridiculous).



As for references, there should be guidelines for them. If there's no, then I advise to include full list of references at the very end, since that's what people expect by default, but it's only an advice, not a rule.