NAEP Scoring of Fourth-Grade Narrative Writing.

Abstract

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1998 Writing Assessment measured student writing performance at the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. Scoring guides for each grade allowed scorers to objectively evaluate students’ work. This issue of NAEPfacts includes a 4th-grade narrative scoring guide, along with samples of student work at each of six levels of performance on the scoring guide. The NAEP Writing Framework, developed by the National Assessment Governing Board, set six overarching goals for the NAEP 1998 Writing Assessment: • Students should write for a variety of purposes: narrative, informative, and persuasive. • Students should write on a variety of tasks and for many different audiences. • Students should write from a variety of stimulus materials, and within various time constraints. • Students should generate, draft, revise, and edit ideas and forms of expression in their writing. • Students should display effective choices in the organization of their writing. They should include detail to illustrate and elaborate their ideas, and use appropriate conventions of written English. • Students should value writing as a communicative activity. Fourth-graders were given two writing topics, or “prompts,” out of a possible 20 and were given 25 minutes to write on each. Each topic was classified according to purpose as either narrative, informative, or persuasive. Three 4th-grade topics have been released to the public. Scoring guides were developed for each writing purpose. The guides established six levels of student performance for each writing purpose, ranging from “Unsatisfactory” to “Excellent.” This issue of NAEPfacts includes the complete text of the 4thgrade “narrative” scoring guide on page two, the complete text of a narrative prompt asking students to write a story about a magic castle, examples of student writing at each of the six levels in response to the “magic castle” prompt, and a discussion of how the scoring guide applies to the six student writing samples. Focused Holistic Scoring The scorers of the NAEP 1998 writing assessment used a scoring method described as “focused holistic scoring.” This approach combines holistic and “primary trait” scoring. A strict holistic approach to the scoring of writing treats a writing task as a “springboard” for writing. A particular writing task is given to students as a stimulus to engage them and inspire them to write, and students’ responses are scored in terms of the overall writing quality. The “primary trait” method of scoring writing, on the other hand, is concerned with how well students respond to a specific topic. For example, if students are asked to write about whether they like adventure movies, students who do not address the topic of