Record S1 · 1979
S1: Explanatory Description
Written spring 1979; published in the December 1980 NAEP report. Age 17 in school; individual grade unknown and must not be imputed as grade 12.
Original student excerpt
I am describing to you what Hawaii looks like. Hawaii has many pineapple and flower orchards. The Island is very beautiful with many volcanos. The weather is nice and warm. the people dress very casualy.
Five consecutive sentences from the handwritten response, line breaks collapsed; original spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar preserved.
Prompt and conditions
Exact prompt. Everybody knows of something that is worth talking about. Maybe you know about a famous building like the Empire State Building in New York City or something like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Or you might know a lot about the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City or the new sports stadium in Atlanta or St. Louis. Or you might be familiar with something from nature, like Niagara Falls, a gigantic wheat field, a grove of orange trees, or a part of a wide, muddy river like the Mississippi. There is probably something you can describe. Choose something you know about. It may be something from around where you live, or something you have seen while traveling, or something you have studied in school. Think about it for a while and then write a description of what it looks like so that it could be recognized by someone who has read your description. Name what you are describing and try to use your best writing.
- Source conditions
- Source Free; none beyond prompt.
- Time
- 26.1 minutes. Appendix records 1,566 seconds.
- Production / archive
- handwritten; anonymous facsimile in 1980 report.
- Drafting
- timed, effectively first draft; no feedback revision.
- Population and selection
- National probability sample of in-school U.S. 17-year-olds in public and private schools; individual grade and geography suppressed; out-of-school 17-year-olds excluded. NAEP stratified multistage probability task sample; displayed paper purposively selected as score-point exemplar.
Scorer and feedback role
Institutional Assessor. Not an authenticated classroom-teacher feedback pair.
- Original source classification
- 2 of 4 — thin/loosely organized description. Whole-response holistic score; mechanics may affect the score; not a classroom grade.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimHawaii is beautiful and recognizable through several features.
Ideas and relationships4 coded units. Crops, volcanoes, climate, and dress are mainly additive traits.
AbstractionConcrete
Causal reasoningNone
Qualification / counterargumentNone
Evidence useRecalled Detail
OrganizationTopic Then List
Sentence controlMeaning Clear Uneven
Lexical precisionGeneral
Articulation limitNo spatial order or individualized scene; assertions remain general.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Holistic score 2 was the modal 1979 band for this task (46.5%); the paper is an agency-selected exemplar, not a random score-2 response.