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Determining instructions of higher order thinking skills in curriculum 2013 is still challenging and new for most English teachers in Indonesian context. Therefore, this current study emphasizes on investigating teachers- understanding in constructing higher order thinking-based assessments and teachers- difficulties in designing the assessments. A case study was applied with two research instruments, namely document analysis in the form of teacher-made assessments and interview with the teachers. The participants of this study were two English teachers from two different junior high schools- one public school and one private schools as the users of Curriculum 2013. The findings reveal that a misconception about the concept of higher order thinking skills assessments among teachers is still found because the teachers dominantly focused on the degree of difficulty of the questions instead of cognitive complexity in designing higher order thinking assessments. Consequently, the test items of the teacher-made assessments may only promote the students- analyzing and evaluating skills, so that the creating skill as the highest level of HOTS seemed not to be identified in the teachers- test. In addition, from the results of interview with the teachers, they claimed that most of the questions were constructed in the form of multiple choices to measure the students- HOTS and they were not confident to modify the multiple choices to be essays and open-ended questions forms as characters of HOTS assessment. It happened because the teachers believed that creating skill is related to a product of written texts. Overall, it is concluded that the teachers- understanding about HOTS-based assessment was likely low and needs to be improved through exposures and enrichment by attending trainings and workshops about HOTS-based assessment.