Grade 6

Narrative

Writing Extended Response

Compose Full Texts

Robots

Conventions

Development/Elaboration

Organization/Purpose

Although many of the sentences are awkward because they string together independent clauses, these are style (and punctuation) errors rather than sentence structure errors (e.g., &#8220;He was shocked and his mom went running to him all worried and he told her that his robot was alive and she went to go check and she grabed Andrew and her car keys and left the house&#8221;).

There are minor punctuation errors that include a missing apostrophe in the contraction &#8220;couldnt.&#8221; However, there are also serious patterns of errors with commas. There are missing commas after many introductory elements (e.g., &#8220;When his mom came home…&#8221;; &#8220;Then the enxt day after school…&#8221;; &#8220;When they got to the store…&#8221;; &#8220;Before he went in the shower…&#8221;) and missing commas in many compound sentences (e.g., &#8220;…he changed it to the news and they both watched it&#8221;; &#8220;It was barely the new toy and Andrew was just about to buy the first one&#8221;). Note: The lack of spacing between end marks and new sentences is distracting but does not constitute an error.

There are minor errors with incorrect or missing articles (&#8220;He played with his toy for a hour and then went to go take shower&#8221;). There are also some verb errors with tense and mood (e.g., &#8220;…he looked everywhere and had found his robot in his closet&#8221;; and &#8220;…mom took him to the store so that he can buy a new toy…&#8221;).

There are no errors with capital letters.

Much of the vocabulary is repeated, so although the number of misspelled words is low (&#8220;Loooking,&#8221; &#8220;wierd,&#8221; &#8220;grabed&#8221;), the ratio of correctly to incorrectly spelled words is high enough to justify a score of 1 in this category.

The characters, setting, and events are mostly listed and fail to meaningfully develop a story. Furthermore, some undeveloped details cause confusion (e.g., there is no explanation for why Andrew’s mom bought him a toy and no explanation for how the robot came alive).

The very vague reference to “playing” with a robot is a connection to source materials.

The response does not utilize narrative techniques such as dialogue or description, and there is no showing or expanding of details to illustrate the experience (e.g., what did the robot look like?).

There is no use of sensory, figurative, or descriptive language of the main character, the robot, or the story setting. The general (&#8220;good things&#8221;) and repetitive (&#8220;toy&#8221;; &#8220;shocked&#8221;) language further confirm a score of 1 for this category.

The response is choppy, reflecting no evidence of narrative style.

There is evidence of an inconsistent plot with the conflict (the robot comes to life and is found under the bed and later in the closet) leading to the resolution (gets to become a member of the police department), which gives more credibility to the plot than just a list of the events at the beginning.

The setting and the characters are minimally established (e.g., we know little about the narrator except that he studies math and watches TV, and neither the setting nor the robot is described at all).

The overuse of the transition &#8220;then&#8221; and, to a lesser degree, &#8220;when&#8221; are so repetitive that they interfere with the flow; other details are connected only with &#8220;and&#8221; (&#8220;He was shocked and his mom went running to him all worried and he told her that his robot was alive and she went to go check and she grabed Andrew and her car keys and left the house&#8221;).

This organization is clear (chronological), but the sequence of events is interrupted by extraneous details (e.g., &#8220;study really hard for the next test and changed the TV to the news channel&#8221;). The actual conflict (his robot was alive), does not come until the end of the story. Furthermore, there are significant gaps in the narrative (e.g., What was the relationship between the narrator and his mother watching news one night to going to a toy store the next day?).

The beginning of the story fails to set up context for events or advance the plot, and although the idea presented at the end is intriguing (police use the robot for good), the story concludes too abruptly to provide closure.

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An annotation is the educator’s explanation of how a portion of the student’s response relates to the rubric and contributes to that trait’s score. For example, the educator might explain how the response meets the expectations of a specific score point. An annotation can also describe aspects of a student response that relate to multiple score points on the rubric to demonstrate nuance when determining a score.

Annotation

One of three traits scored for the ELA performance task full write, this trait measures a student’s ability to demonstrate command of grade-level conventions of standard English: grammar usage (including sentence formation), capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.

This trait measures students’ ability to select and integrate details that support, explain, illustrate, or develop ideas. Students should elaborate these details—that is, explain and connect them, guided by the writing purpose and audience needs.
For informative/explanatory and opinion/argumentative writing purposes, these details come from source materials.
For narrative writing, this trait is called Development/Elaboration, and students are expected to integrate and develop grade-appropriate story elements such as descriptive details and dialogue. For these tasks, events and experiences are inspired by source materials.

Evidence/Elaboration

This trait measures students’ ability to establish and sustain a focus for the writing. This focus should be consistent with the task’s designated purpose and the intended audience. Strong introductions and conclusions (or, for narrative writing, beginnings and endings) and transitions help to create coherence.

Performance tasks measure a student’s ability to demonstrate critical-thinking and problem-solving skills by challenging students to apply their knowledge and skills to complex, real-world problems. In the performance task, students are presented with a collection of questions and activities connected to a single theme or scenario. These activities ask students to demonstrate capacities such as depth of understanding, writing and research skills, and complex analysis, which cannot be adequately assessed with traditional assessment questions. Performance tasks are taken on a computer (but are not computer adaptive) and take students one to two class periods to complete.

Performance Task

The prompt is the text provided to the student that requests their response. It includes some contextual information, but also includes a specific task that students complete in their writing response.

Prompt

For a deeper dive into the content behind this student response, navigate to the Sample Items Website to access the writing prompt or visit the Content Explorer to learn more about this content area.

Prompt & Target

“Purpose” is the context for a piece of writing, or what the writer intends to accomplish. Students write texts with the following purposes:
<ul>
<li>Narrative (grades 3–8): tell a story</li>
<li>Informational (grades 3–5): present facts or data using source material</li>
<li>Explanatory (grades 6–11): explain a topic or concept by analyzing source materials</li>
<li>Opinion (grades 3–5): present and defend a position</li>
<li>Argumentative (grades 6–11): present an argument using research to form and support claims</li>
</ul>
Purposes have subtle differences depending on grade, and each writing purpose has its own scoring rubric.

Purpose

This text was written by a student in response to a Performance Task writing prompt.

Response

A rubric is a set framework for scorers to reference when determining the quality of student writing. Each trait has its own rubric, and every point value is defined in detail with examples of what to expect from student writing at each level.

Rubric

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Sample Term One

Sample Term Two

Traits are different dimensions of a student response that educators evaluate when scoring. For example, an educator will assess grammar and spelling as part of the Conventions trait (maximum of two score points) but not take grammar or spelling into account when assessing the other traits. This approach ensures that scorers evaluate student writing from multiple angles.

Example for Grade 6: Narrative – Robots - ID: 4132

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