Record S9 · 1979
S9: Explanatory Business Letter
Written spring 1979; published in the December 1980 NAEP report. Age 17 in school; individual grade unknown.
Original student excerpt
I am writing you this note so that I inform you that I do not owe you $14.98 because I never recieved the electric blanket which I ordered three months ago. I suppose you will refer my account to your collection service even though I never recieved what I orderd but did recieve a bill.
Two consecutive sentences from the handwritten response; original language preserved.
Prompt and conditions
Exact prompt. Suppose that on June 4, 1978, you ordered an electric blanket that Big Mart had advertised for $14.98. On June 15, you received a letter stating that the supply of electric blankets was temporarily exhausted, but that your order would be filled shortly. You have never received the electric blanket, but every month since then you have received a computerized bill for the $14.98. Now, after three months, you have received the letter below. BIG MART INC. P.O. Box 29 Buffalo, New York 14240 September 10, 1978 In reply refer to Account #4377 Dear Customer: According to our records your account has been unpaid for three months. If there has been an error, please let us know what the problem is. We hope that within ten days we will receive $14.98. Otherwise, we will have to refer your account to our collection service. Very truly yours, Jason Jones Accounts Manager Pretend that you are Pat Brown and write a letter to Mr. Jones explaining why you never sent the $14.98.
- Source conditions
- Prompt Document No Research Sources; prompt business letter only.
- Time
- 14.9 minutes. Appendix records 896 seconds.
- 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. 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
- 2 of 4 — marginal information transmission. Identifies writer, collection and product, and at least implies company action; whole-response task-specific score.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimThe bill is not owed because the blanket was never delivered.
Ideas and relationships4 coded units. Debt denial, elapsed nonreceipt, anticipated collection, and erroneous billing form a contradiction.
AbstractionEmerging
Causal reasoningMultistep
Qualification / counterargumentAnticipated Action
Evidence usePrompt And Transaction Detail
OrganizationClaim Reason Consequence Contradiction
Sentence controlMeaning Clear Uneven
Lexical precisionTask Specific
Articulation limitThe debt is disputed, but no fully explicit remedy is requested in the excerpt.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Primary-trait score 2 represented 18.4%; interior rather than inadequate or ideal, on a task-specific information construct.