Assessing the level of the higher order thinking skills of seventh class level determining exam's math questions

The purpose of this study is to determine the level of measuring the higher order thinking skills of the 7th grade math class questions, according to the views of teachers and field experts.Research group of this study is 30 math teachers who were serving in the 2008-2009 academic year, in the province of Bayburt and 30 mathematics education experts at various universities of Turkey. Research data has been provided with "SBS exam 7th grade Identifying Higher Order Thinking Skills of Mathematics Scale " which was developed by researchers. The views of the 39 higher order thinking skills contains the levels determined in six sub-dimensions (problem solving, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, critical thinking, and creativity) in terms of mathematics achievement and opinions regarding to higher order thinking skills in seventh grade SBS 2008 mathematics test are compared with the views of the teachers and field experts and are represented with frequency and percents. In terms of scale reliability, internal consistency coefficient of the test (Cronbach ?) was calculated as 0,94. The comparison of teachers and field experts? views about the level of importance was determined with Cramer V coefficient.As the result of research, when the situations that teachers and field experts are agree on examined by taking the percentage and frequency values of opinions above 50% into consideration, it has been identified that maths questions of the 2008 SBS Exam do not contain the questions that measure higher order thinking skills. Although there is no big difference between teachers and field experts on the level of importance given to the higher order thinking skills in terms of 7th grade math gains, field experts give greater importance to the higher order thinking skills in terms of achievements.As a result, the questions have to be distributed proportionally with higher order thinking skills and achievements. In SBS exam, creating the questions which measure all levels of the cognitive field based on our research, especially asking the ones measure the higher order thinking skills should be a prerequisites in order to provide more efficiency from young learners who are the assurance of our future.