Grade 8

Narrative

Writing Extended Response

Compose Full Texts

Geocaching

Conventions

Development/Elaboration

Organization/Purpose

The third and fourth (of six total) sentences are run-ons.

Relative to the brevity of the response, frequent errors with punctuation indicate minimal control of this convention. There is a missing apostrophe for a contraction (“dont”) and a lack of a period to end the final sentence. There are comma errors, including missing commas to separate compound independent clauses (e.g., “They think they find it but it turns out to be a snake”), unnecessary commas (e.g., “the snake calms down, and crawls back into its hole”), and incorrect/missing punctuation for dialogue (“One of the members…says dont worry its not poisionous, it has a flat head”).

There are no errors with capital letters.

There is an error with frequently confused words &#8220;its&#8221; and &#8220;it’s&#8221;.

There are many spelling errors, including “menbers,” ”ian” (and), “geocach,” “thatv” (that), “poisionous,” and  &#8220;wjat.&#8221;

The only details provided concern the snake. The idea of grabbing a snake instead of a geocaching clue is not wrong, but the overall event is not embedded within relevant information, and the response itself is too brief for a higher score.

There are two vague references to finding a “geocach.”

Relevant events are not described, and sensory details that would illustrate the story are not provided. A single line of dialogue is attempted.

The language is weak and confusing.

The response is too brief to show any awareness of narrative style.

There are minimal plot elements in this off-task story. Even though there is a passing reference to “tying to find a geocach,” the major conflict concerns a snake and not a geocache search. The response does not represent a unified story.

There is a conflict with a snake and a brief attempt to use dialogue. If there is any intentional point of view, it is third person. The primary focus is on the snake, with no specific characters, only “club menbers.”

There are no appropriate transition words.

There is a brief series of events about a snake, presented in chronological order, but the details are too minimal to provide unity.

Both the first and final sentences represent a weak and unsatisfactory attempt at framing a story.

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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 8: Narrative – Geocaching - ID: 5306

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