The evolution in science and technology forces science education to develop and reorganize itself in terms of perception, method of approach which leads education to think about the concept of knowledge. It becomes difficult to follow new concepts, understandings, and phenomena in science. Similarly it turns out to be impossible to teach all concepts to students. Therefore, there is a need of teaching the ways of accessing the knowledge. Students should gain the skills of accessing, and analyzing knowledge (McDermott, 1991). The teaching of science includes the teaching of science process skills. Gagne (1965) implies that science process skills are involved in scientific inquiry and they are seen as the foundation for scientific inquiry. These skills are important in terms of understanding the physical world. In addition, these skills improve the creative thinking, problem solving, and critical thinking skills of students. Since the development of science process skills become a major goal of science education, it can be concluded that this is good reason on its own to include science process skills in any assessment of learning in science. If students are expected to learn the process of science, at least three conditions must be presented. First of all, the teacher must have a command of the process skills. Next, the students must be taught and given opportunities to practice the skills. Finally, student progress in acquiring the skills must be evaluated (Radford, 1992). Assessment of students’ science process skills is essential for at least two reasons. First, if teachers are to improve both the process skills and opportunities for learning about the processes associated with learning science, they need more accurate information regarding what a student has and does not have. Second, more accurate feedback regarding the content and process knowledge of students at all grade levels could inform many of the parties interested in science education reform such as teachers, administrators, and researchers. While teaching based on science process skills is emphasized, students should be assessed through these skills by appropriate assessment instruments. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to construct a test to determine science process skills of 9th grade students in the concepts of Electric charge, Electrostatic charging, Electric force, Conductivity. The results of the test will be used to understand current status of students in terms of science process skills. The test has mainly three dimensions: understanding, critical thinking and creative thinking.

The procedure of the study includes literature review, test construction, pilot study for revision, test revision process, revised-test administration, data analysis and reporting the study. After articles, theses, books based on science process skills were obtained and analyzed to write questions by literature review, item pool is prepared. Questions of item pool are revised by specialists. The test includes questions from item pool which are proven as reliable and valid through pilot study. A pilot study is conducted to 10 students which is the twenty percent of the sample. After the pilot study, students and teachers are interviewed to get feedback about the test itself, administration of the test, usability of the test, and recommendations about improvement of test, and its administration. The pilot study is helpful in order to revise the test with respect to feedbacks given.

The test is expected to be reliable and valid to be used to measure science process skills of high school students for the concept of electricity. The results of test are analyzed through item analysis, and factor analysis. Moreover, another reliable and valid science process skills test is conducted to the sample. Correlation between the widely used SPST and the newly developed context based SPST is investigated and the results show that the newly developed context dependent SPST has construct validity, because students who have higher scores on widely used SPST also have higher scores on this newly developed context dependent test; vice versa. The science process skills test developed previously are concept independent. However, this test is concept dependent. It would be beneficial for teachers to use this test with the purpose of determining changes in students’ science process skills before and after the concept of electricity.