Developing a science process skills test regarding the units of the 7th grade Science and Technology education program

The main goal of this study is to develop a valid and reliable 'Science Process Skills Test For 7th Graders (BSBT-7)' which regards the units of the elementary 7th grade science and technology program and assesses the science process skills. Moreover, the relationship between BSBT-7 points and gender, school science and technology course grades, parents' educational status, being registered to a private school offering specialized courses and the usage of some resources were investigated as minor aims.Within the scope these aims, an item pool including 43 multiple choice test items was prepared. To ensure the content validity, reviews of the experts were taken and according to their feedbacks, questions were revised and 6 questions were eliminated. And then pilot application was conducted with 100 elementary 7th graders, and item analyses, factor analyses for construct validity and internal consistency reliability analyses were conducted.Consistent with the results of item analyses, 5 items which have a difficulty index of lower than 0.6 and a discrimination index of lower than 0.2 were extracted from the test. In addition, according to the results of factor analyses 1 item was extracted from the test. Remain 31 items fell under the 7 factors which explain the 54.93% of the total variance. The internal consistency analyses showed that KR-20 coefficient of the final test is 0.885 and also split half model results showed that the correlation of forms is 0.706. The main application was conducted with 168 elementary 7th grade students in the center of Çanakkale. In addition, a criteria test was applied to 38 of this 168 students and the correlation coefficient between the BSBT-7 scores and criteria scores of this group was found as 0.732. In addition, the final internal consistency analyses (split half) results showed that the correlation coefficient between forms is 0.705 and the general alpha coefficients for both halves are 0.825 and 0.826.Moreover, it was found that there is a significant difference in BSBT-7 scores according to school science and technology course grades, fathers' educational status and being registered to a private school offering specialized courses (p<.05). Also, it wasn?t proved that there is a significant difference in BSBT-7 scores according to genders, mothers? educational status and the usage of resource (p>.05).Keywords: Science Process Skills, Test Development, Validity, Reliabilit