Grade 4

Narrative

Writing Extended Response

Compose Full Texts

Ant Colony

Conventions

Development/Elaboration

Organization/Purpose

Given the length of the response, there are quite a few instances of comma splices (Paragraph 1: “There were ants everywhere, they all seemed do be in different groups doing different things.” Paragraph 2: “…I’ve seen this place in a book before, oh yeah its called an ant colony!” Paragraph 3: “Hey what happended to the hole that I fell through, Its gone.”). There is an extra “were” in the second sentence of paragraph 2 (“I also saw ants that were leaving and were looked like they were going out to get more food.”).
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Capitalization is generally correct, although the response uses a lowercase “i” for the pronoun “I” in the final sentence.
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There are missing apostrophes in contractions in paragraph 2 (“…its called an ant colony!”) and paragraph 3 (“Its gone.”). There is no period at the end of the last sentence, although it seems clear that the student was not finished writing this story. There should be a comma as well as a question mark for the second sentence in paragraph 3 (“Hey[,] what happended to the hole that I fell through[?]”).

The use of the wrong word makes the last sentence in paragraph 1 confusing (“they all seemed do be in different groups…”).

Several grade-level words are misspelled in the final paragraph: “happended,” “nromal,” “Welll,” and “thruogh.”

The writer gives a cursory list of unexplained events (“The last thing I saw was a giant ant. It must have been a queen ant.”).

The writer uses information from the sources to add details (e.g., “I saw were ants that were building something, getting food for the other ants, and guarding the place that I was in.”); however, the ideas are a bit vague.

The writer attempts to use narrative strategies by providing a cursory setting and some character development, mostly through dialogue  (e.g., “What is this place?” “Hey what happended to the hole that I fell through, Its gone.”), to advance the story.

Much of the exposition uses simplistic, if appropriate, language (“building something,” “guarding the place”), while the dialogue uses more lively language, attempting to show the character (“’Wait,’ I thought for a few minutes, ‘I’ve seen this place in a book before, oh yeah its called an ant colony!’”).

The opening is brief. The response essentially starts right in the middle of the action. This would be great if there were really some action happening in the narrative. And the ending, because there is essentially no real plot, is as brief as the opening and far less satisfactory.

The narrative fails to establish any characters or a setting beyond the narrator being in an ant colony.

However appropriate, the writer uses transitions mainly to move the reader from one paragraph to the other. Overall there is little connection between the ideas presented.

There is no real sequence of events, just a list of things the narrator sees in the ant colony, which is presented in the second paragraph.

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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: 720

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