  Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information
from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how
assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how
assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think
it means to know and do physics, i.e. their epistemologies. Using data from
students completing assessment questions during one-on-one think aloud
interviews, we explore how assessment features impact (or did not impact)
student engagement with the assessment problems. We analyze video recordings
and transcripts to infer the epistemological framings and resources students
use while completing introductory-level physics problems. Students' framings
tended to be fairly stable, but when shifts did occur - they were triggered by
a shift in resource, which can be activated by assessment feature. This work
extends existing work on epistemological framing into the realm of assessment
and allows us to consider the effects of assessments on our students'
understanding of physics teaching and learning.
