In my previous post on NAEP writing scores, Michael Scriven commented on the sometimes misleading achievement categories of Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. His point was to urge people to look at actual samples, and they’ll find, for instance, that NAEP’s category of Advanced probably won’t match ours. On NAEP’s site you can find sample responses, and here is one for 12th grade. The student was asked to write about the relative influence of “big” and “small” inventions on people’s daily lives. These are the first two paragraphs of a response that received the highest score, “Excellent.”
“Inventions are designs and ideas people have come up with to make people’s lives easier. Big or small, inventions have impacted the way I live my everyday life. When asking whether it’s the bigger inventions or the smaller ones that made a difference, it’s the bigger ones because they have affected my life as the name implies in ‘bigger’ ways. Computers, cars, and televisions are just a few of the many big inventions that change my life for the better.
“I was absent from school one day and was at a loss for the homework assignments and quizzes given out. I called my friend, and she told me that we had a biology exam tomorrow. I panicked because I didn’t have any of the notes. My friend scanned the notes and emailed me her notes. Within seconds my fears of failing the exam vanished because now I had a reasource to study from. The computer resolved the trouble of me having to drive to my friend’s house and handwriting the notes. The computer saved a lot of time and effort and helped me directly focus faster on what mattered — studing.”
The punctuation and spelling errors are in the original. The rest of the response is here.
