Table 1.

Chinese composition rubric for Hong Kong third grade children

	Score
	1	2	3	4
Content
1. Relevance	Mostly or totally irrelevant	Partly relevant	Mostly relevant	Totally relevant
2. Breadth a	Very few ideas (1–2 aspects)	Few ideas (e.g., 3 aspects involved)	Some ideas (e.g., 4 aspects involved)	A wide diversity of ideas (e.g., more than 4 aspects)
3. Depth	No elaboration of ideas	An attempt to elaborate on 1 main idea	Occasional rich elaboration on idea(s)	Most ideas are adequately elaborated
Organization
4. Sentence level organization	Many note-like phrases/incomplete sentences	Many short sentences. Obviously inadequate use of connective/sequencers. OR Ideas are linked in a confusing way in a sentence	Occasional good attempt to link isolated ideas more smoothly with connective/sequencers	Good use of connectives/sequencers to link ideas effectively
5. Paragraph level organization	No evidence of organizational structure according to ideas. OR Essay too short. No basis to judge	Relevant sentences are partly grouped, but overall, the flow of ideas is not logical enough to be followed with ease	Relevant sentences are mostly grouped. Minor reordering might still be needed for ideas to flow naturally	Sentences are organized effectively to convey meaning naturally and logically
6. Prominence of organizational (key) elements	Topic sentence and conclusion are not present. OR Either topic sentence or conclusion is present but not standing out	Topic sentence is present and easy to identify	Topic sentence and conclusion are present but either or both do not stand out	Topic sentences and conclusion are present and easy to identify
7. Intelligibility	(Almost) impossible to understand. Purpose of writing not accomplished	Need some effort to understand	Fairly easy to understand despite problems in organization/language mechanics	Easy to understand and pleasant to read

^aIncluding irrelevant points