Record S4 · 1979
S4: Fictional Narrative
Written spring 1979; published in the December 1980 NAEP report. Age 17 in school; individual grade unknown.
Original student excerpt
as well, We can rent him out, teach him to do a comedy act. He’ll be no trouble at all. Can we please keep him, mom?
Three consecutive sentences beginning where the scanned sentence begins; capitalization and punctuation preserved.
Prompt and conditions
Exact prompt. Look at the picture for a while, and then make up a story about it. When you are ready, write your story. It may be helpful for you to start with one of the following lines, but you may begin in any way you wish. Possible First Lines “I’m telling you, Henry, if you don’t get rid of that thing, it’s going to eat up the cat!” “But mother, I am telling the truth! It laid an egg in the Chevy.” “Last night a very odd-looking bird appeared in the neighborhood.”
- Source conditions
- Picture Prompt No Sources; picture and possible opening lines only.
- Time
- 25 minutes. Explicit task time.
- Production / archive
- handwritten; anonymous facsimile in 1980 report.
- Drafting
- timed first draft; no feedback revision.
- Population and selection
- National probability sample of in-school U.S. 17-year-olds; individual grade/geography suppressed; out-of-school youth excluded. NAEP 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
- 3 of 4 — clear evidence of storytelling. Whole-response narrative primary-trait score; some thinness or closure, point-of-view, dialogue, or narration problem could remain.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimKeeping the bird could be useful and harmless.
Ideas and relationships4 coded units. Rental, performance, reassurance, and a request form a compact proposal.
AbstractionEmerging
Causal reasoningSimple
Qualification / counterargumentAnticipated Objection
Evidence useHypothetical Example
OrganizationProposal Reassurance Appeal
Sentence controlMeaning Clear Uneven
Lexical precisionFunctional
Articulation limitEconomic and ethical implications are unexplored; justification is playful and brief.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Primary-trait score 3 was modal (64.7%) and shows clear but non-top storytelling; this is a selected exemplar.