View the Performance Task
Lights, Candles, Action! Performance Task
This performance task is part of the Smarter Balanced Practice test. The task stimulus describes two candles that are being used in a scene for a movie. The stimulus provides the initial heights and burn rates of the candles, together with pictures of the candles before they are lit and 1 hour after they are lit. Students are required to reason about the decreasing heights of the candles as they burn at different rates in the context of filming the movie scene. There are six items in the task. The task is designed to support students in building directly on their reasoning from earlier items of the task in order to complete later items of the task.
Smarter Balanced Resources
- Task with Scoring Guide
- Take the Practice Test
* This performance task comes from the Smarter Balanced Practice test items released in February 2017.
Learn About Smarter Balanced Accessibility Features.
Download Student Work and Scoring Examples
Download scored and unscored sample student work.
| Item | Scored Student Samples |
Unscored Student Samples |
Scoring Key |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | click to download | click to download | click to download |
| 2 | click to download | click to download | click to download |
| 3 | click to download | click to download | click to download |
| 4 | click to download | click to download | click to download |
| 5 | click to download | click to download | click to download |
| 6 | click to download | click to download | click to download |
Download Case Studies
Each case study provides an analysis of an individual student’s responses to all of the questions in a performance task, unpacks the scoring, and considers next steps for supporting the student to demonstrate college- and career-readiness. Case studies 1 and 2 are analyses of English Learner (EL) students’ responses to the performance task.