Grade 7

Narrative

Writing Extended Response

Compose Full Texts

Mount Everest

Conventions

Development/Elaboration

Organization/Purpose

The response generally uses appropriate sentence structures with only occasional lapses into awkward wording (in paragraph 1: “As I lifted my ice axe to pull up mysef up farther…” and “I sometimes laugh at myself, remembering the moment that same day I started to climb that Mount Everest was filled with snow.”). There is one instance of a fragment (sentence 3 in paragraph 6: “Even if that meant having a cast on your right foot for the next couple of months”), but this may have been intentional for effect.

There are no errors in capitalization.
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Punctuation is generally correct, with three instances of unneeded commas (paragraph 1: “Everything in life seemed amazing, which was obviously a lie, because then, how will you learn?”; paragraph 5: “I got up, very slowly because…”; and the final paragraph: “I slowly rose up like that time I fell, and went to the kitchen where the cookies waited.”).
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There is one instance of a tense shift (paragraph 1: “…because of the ice forming around the place I’m supposed to hold on to” should be: “…because of the ice forming around the place I was supposed to hold on to.”). In paragraph 5, the first sentence should read “I got up very slowly because I was sure I had broken my foot.” There is an inappropriate shift in person in the fragment “Even if that meant having a cast on your right foot for the next couple of months.
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There are a few misspellings of grade-level words: “amazng,” “pleasureable,” “mysef,” “claories,” “siting,” and “rasin.”

This response provides adequate elaboration using descriptive details and information from the source materials. The events are adequately developed over the course of the narrative. Throughout the narrative, the writer effectively uses information from the sources to add details to the story (e.g., “The process of burning 6000 calories a day instead of 2000 claories as tiring”) to help make the story believable.

The writer uses a variety of narrative techniques to create an engaging story.

There is an adequate use of concrete language (e.g., “I pulled out my bag of oatmeal rasin and chocolate chip cookies and a packet filled with soup. I began to bod the soup as I munched on the cookies. They tasted like what my mom made for me at home, which was almost half-way across the world. A tear almost spilled out, but I held it in. I didn’t want to take off my goggles in this cold weather!”). Stylistically, the response is appropriate and there is enough detail and description to advance the purpose of the writing.

This response adequately demonstrates organization that is appropriate for a narrative writing task. Although a bit repetitive (the word “amazing” is used three times in the first three sentences), the narrative opens with an engaging beginning that briefly describes the setting. The ending is contrived (a dream sequence) but does provide closure.

The writer establishes a setting using descriptive language (e.g., “I grabbed on to the first rock that jutted out”). The writer uses a consistent first-person point of view from the perspective of the main character.

The sequence of events adequately follows a logical order as the story progresses. However, there are some confusing parts that interrupt the flow (e.g., &#8220;I sometimes laugh at myself, remembering the moment that same day I started to climb that Mount verest was filled with snow&#8221;).

There are a variety of transitional strategies used by the writer (“Later on,” “As I lifted my ice axe,” “Siting down”) to connect ideas and help the progression of the plot.

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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 7: Narrative – Mount Everest - ID: 946

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