Grade 4

Narrative

Writing Extended Response

Compose Full Texts

Ant Colony

Conventions

Development/Elaboration

Organization/Purpose

There are sentence structure errors (e.g., the second to the last sentence is a run-on).
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There are punctuation errors. There are quite a few missing commas (e.g. “I told them what are you doing  in the ants house” should be punctuated for dialogue). There are missing apostrophes for the possessive “ants house” throughout and a missing apostrophe with the possessive of friend (“my friend hand”).
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There are some errors in grammar usage. For example, “a” instead of “an” before ant throughout the narrative. Other grammar usage errors include with frequently confused words (“where” instead of &#8220;were&#8221;), error with the double negative (“didn’t learn nothing” instead of &#8220;anything&#8221;), errors with simple plurals (“ant” instead of &#8220;ants&#8221; in sentence 5), and errors with verbs (“felled” instead of &#8220;fell&#8221;).
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There are many spelling errors (e.g., “didin’t”, “frined”, “houes”, “garred”, “angian”).

There are capitalization errors (e.g., “i”).

This response does little to establish any characters or a setting. It does clearly and explicitly indicate, “I fell in Its house  and saw lots of ant working with the  gueen ant. I was tuck in a colony and didin&#8217;t know what to do.”

Additionally, the writer makes a vague reference to the source materials by way of mentioning “the gueen ant.”

There is minimal use of any narrative techniques. The response mostly lists a series of events that do very little to advance the story or paint a picture of the experience for the reader.

There is nearly no use of sensory details or figurative language other than, “smaller  like a ant.”

The stilted, choppy language of the response does not indicate a style that is appropriate for the narrative purpose of the task.

This response demonstrates limited organization appropriate to the task of writing a narrative. The brief opening appears to be the writer’s attempt at establishing a setting (“I was playing outside…”). The ending is too brief and does not provide a satisfying closing for the narrative overall.

However, the writer does little to establish the characters (the narrator, the friend, and an ant) from the first-person perspective of the narrator.

There is a list of events with connecting ideas joined by “and” and “but.” However, with the exception of “but then” in the first sentence of the second paragraph, there are no real transitional strategies used by the writer.

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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 4: Narrative – Ant Colony - ID: 677

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