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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. 

Abstract Silent hypoxemia, or "happy hypoxia", is a puzzling phenomenon in which patients who have contracted COVID-19 exhibit very low oxygen saturation ( ${\text{SaO}}_2$< 80%) but do not experience discomfort in breathing. The mechanism by which this blunted response to hypoxia occurs is unknown. We have previously shown that a computational model of the respiratory neural network (Diekman et al. in J Neurophysiol 118(4):2194–2215, 2017) can be used to test hypotheses focused on changes in chemosensory inputs to the central pattern generator (CPG). We hypothesize that altered chemosensory function at the level of the carotid bodies and/or thenucleus tractus solitariiare responsible for the blunted response to hypoxia. Here, we use our model to explore this hypothesis by altering the properties of the gain function representing oxygen sensing inputs to the CPG. We then vary other parameters in the model and show that oxygen carrying capacity is the most salient factor for producing silent hypoxemia. We call for clinicians to measure hematocrit as a clinical index of altered physiology in response to COVID-19 infection. 

The emphasis on an equitable vision of science learning in current science education reform efforts sees students as contributing to knowledge-building through drawing on their rich cultural and linguistic backgrounds while engaging in the three dimensions to make sense of compelling, relevant phenomena. However, this vision will not be fully realized without coherence between curriculum, instruction, and assessment. As a majority of states have now adopted standards aligned to or adapted from the Framework, we see an urgent need for assessments that can support rather than conflict with equitable science learning. In this study, we seek to understand the current state of Framework-aligned assessment tasks. We have amassed 352 middle school tasks, originating from state-level assessment banks and assessment developers at universities or research organizations. Our preliminary findings from characterizing 104 tasks revealed that the majority of tasks target dimensions of the NGSS or Framework-based standards and include a phenomenon. However, there are challenges in framing phenomena that attend to students’ interests and identities and engage students in three-dimensional sensemaking. Additionally, some phenomena are not based in real-world observations and are not authentic from students’ perspectives, which makes it difficult for students to see connections of local or global relevance.