Elementary school teachers’ identification ability and perceptions of hots mathematics items

Despite widespread policy emphasis on Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) in elementary mathematics education, prior research has predominantly focused on teachers' declarative perceptions, leaving open the question of whether they can reliably identify HOTS items in practice. This gap between endorsing HOTS in principle and demonstrating operational competence represents a critical yet underexplored dimension of teacher assessment literacy. This study examines elementary school teachers' ability to identify HOTS mathematics items and investigates the relationship between their perceptions and identification performance. A descriptive quantitative approach was employed with 52 elementary school teachers in West Java, Indonesia, selected through purposive sampling. Data were collected using a performance-based HOTS item-identification test, a Rasch model analysis, and a teacher-perception questionnaire. Although teachers generally held positive perceptions of HOTS, no significant relationship was found between perception scores and identification ability (ρ = −0.061, p = .666), indicating that favorable attitudes do not necessarily translate into operational competence. Rasch analysis further revealed a tendency among teachers to conflate procedural complexity with genuine cognitive demand, as reflected in item misfit patterns. Teachers who had received HOTS training demonstrated higher identification ability than those without such training, whereas teaching experience revealed no significant effect. These findings highlight a gap between declarative knowledge and operational skill and call for competency-based HOTS training in elementary teacher professional development, while demonstrating the value of integrating performance-based assessment with psychometric modeling to strengthen teacher assessment literacy.