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In response to reform efforts to center students’ interest and identity in the context of assessment, we pilot tested a set of three-dimensional, phenomenon-driven assessment tasks and asked students to respond to additional items that prompted them to reflect on their experience with the tasks. Using a qualitative approach, we analyzed written responses from 502 middle school students across the United States. Through inductive and deductive coding, we developed a comprehensive framework that captures students' experiences across five dimensions: cognitive engagement, affective engagement, relevance to students’ lives, beyond-classroom connections, and assessment design and features. By exploring these dimensions, the framework aims to provide a comprehensive lens for understanding how students experience science assessments, revealing key insights into the factors that influence their engagement and learning. Ultimately, this framework can serve as a practical tool for educators and researchers to analyze and improve science assessments by centering students' voices, thereby fostering deeper learning, promoting student agency, and supporting all learners. 

This paper examines an online professional learning intervention to develop teachers’ pedagogical design capacity to develop five-dimensional (5D) learning and assessment opportunities, which involve integrated use of science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts in science to make sense of phenomena and problems that are interesting to students and support students as knowers, doers, and users of science. We present findings from our design study, which suggest both the promise of such an approach and some of the challenges and tensions experienced by teachers as they chose and used phenomena to support 5D learning opportunities for students.