Though several conceptual inventories have been developed for thermal physics, none target upper-division material and all focus specifically on thermodynamics without including statistical mechanics content. In this paper, we outline the development process of an upper-division thermal physics assessment that captures both thermodynamics and statistical mechanics content. To ensure that the assessment can be broadly usable, as a first step in this process, we administered a survey to physics faculty to determine the scope and content variability of thermal physics courses across institutions. We received over 70 responses from 63 unique institutions, approximately half of which are minority-serving institutions and women’s colleges. Our findings support the claim that there is significant variation in the content covered at different institutions, but also some general agreement on a number of core content areas. We identified 10 key topics which were listed by the majority (95%) of survey respondents to focus on for the assessment development process. We then wrote assessment objectives that encompass core content goals within these 10 topics, which guided the writing of free-response assessment items that were piloted with students. Using student responses to the free-response items, we developed multiple-response versions, which includes both multiple-choice and coupled, multiple-response items. In this paper, we present details of the faculty survey, including methods of developing and distributing the survey to solicit a broad range of perspectives. Additionally, we present results of the survey, including core content covered by faculty in upper-division thermal physics courses, and discuss how these results were used to guide development of assessment objectives and assessment items. We include the full development process of one assessment item as an example.

中文翻译：

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根据教师对关键内容覆盖范围的看法，设计上层热物理评估项目

尽管已经为热物理学开发了一些概念清单，但没有一个目标清单是针对上层除法的材料，并且都专门针对热力学而不包括统计力学内容。在本文中，我们概述了捕获热力学和统计力学内容的高阶热物理评估的开发过程。为了确保评估可以广泛使用，作为此过程的第一步，我们对物理系进行了一项调查，以确定跨机构的热物理课程的范围和内容的可变性。我们收到了来自63个独特机构的70多个回复，其中大约一半是少数民族服务机构和女子学院。我们的发现支持以下说法：不同机构所涵盖的内容存在很大差异，而且在一些核心内容领域也达成了一些一般性协议。我们确定了10个关键主题，这些受访者中大多数（95％）列出了这些主题，并将其重点放在评估开发过程中。然后，我们编写了包含这10个主题中核心内容目标的评估目标，从而指导了由学生试行的自由响应评估项目的编写。利用学生对自由回答项目的回答，我们开发了多种回答版本，其中包括多项选择和耦合的多项回答项目。在本文中，我们介绍了教师调查的详细信息，包括开发和分发调查以征求广泛观点的方法。此外，我们还提供了调查结果，包括高阶热物理课程中教师所涵盖的核心内容，并讨论如何使用这些结果来指导评估目标和评估项目的开发。我们以一个评估项目的完整开发过程为例。