This week you wrote an informative piece explaining what the Reserve Bank does. Now you’ll read another student’s piece and judge how strong it is. Working through how assessors evaluate informative writing about real-world systems sharpens your ability to apply the same lens to your own work.
Part 1
The Assessor Scorecard for
Informative – Informative piece
Informative writing explains ideas, concepts or processes so readers understand something they did not know before. Strong pieces select relevant material, organise it clearly, and use accessible language and examples.
Ideas & Content
Informative writing is only as strong as the ideas it contains.
Weak responses either include irrelevant material or skip the detail readers need.
Strong informative writing chooses the most important concepts, explains them fully, and uses specific examples that make abstract ideas real.
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Relevant selection: explains the core concepts readers need, not disconnected extra facts.
Structure & Cohesion
Readers learn best when ideas follow a logical sequence.
Strong responses move from simple to complex, or from overview to detail, or follow a clear cause-and-effect chain.
Transitional language — ‘as a result’, ‘this means that’ — helps readers see relationships between paragraphs.
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Logical sequence: moves from role to mechanism to effect so understanding builds.
Audience & Purpose
Informative writing must match the audience’s knowledge and needs.
Writing for peers differs from writing for adults or younger children.
Strong responses anticipate what readers know, define technical terms without oversimplifying, and use relatable examples — especially when explaining real-world systems to ordinary readers.
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Reader awareness: defines technical terms and connects ideas to ordinary experience.
Language Choices
Informative writing uses clear, straightforward language.
Weak responses use vague words like ‘stuff’ or ‘basically’, or sentences so long readers lose the meaning.
Strong ones use concrete nouns, active verbs and sentences long enough to be complete but short enough to be clear.
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Concrete language: makes abstract economic ideas clear through exact nouns and active verbs.
Conventions
Accurate spelling, punctuation and sentence construction matter because errors make the explanation harder to follow.
Stronger responses keep control so readers focus on understanding.
Conventions also include accurate representation of factual material — getting the details right is essential to credibility.
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Clean accuracy: protects trust by keeping facts, spelling and sentences clear.
Part 2
Today’s Marking Targets
Task in one sentence
Write a three-paragraph informative piece for ordinary Australians explaining what the Reserve Bank does, how interest rates work, and how cash rate changes affect everyday life.
Let’s Focus
Three strands matter most this week: Ideas & Content, Structure & Cohesion and Audience & Purpose. Ideas & Content decides whether your reader understands the RBA’s role and the mechanism. Structure & Cohesion decides whether they can follow the chain from role to mechanism to effect. Audience & Purpose decides whether the explanation lands for ordinary Australians, not economics students.
Ideas & Content
Assessors reward responses that select the most relevant material from the notes and explain it with enough detail for readers to understand. That means explaining what the RBA does (not just naming it), how the cash rate works (not just saying it exists), and the real-world effect (not just ‘it affects mortgages’). Specific examples make explanations concrete.
What markers scan for
- Selection of relevant material covering the RBA’s role, how interest rates work and how this affects ordinary people.
- Specific details — inflation target, recent rate rises, variable-rate mortgages — that make the explanation concrete.
- Explanation that goes beyond naming concepts to showing how they actually work.
Score Bands
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Basic
Includes some relevant ideas but is incomplete; the reader does not fully understand how interest rates work or why they matter.
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Strong
Selects relevant material and explains it clearly; readers understand the RBA’s role, the mechanism and the real-world effect.
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Excellent
Selects and develops relevant ideas; explanations are clear and specific; readers understand why the decisions matter to ordinary Australians.
Structure & Cohesion
Readers need a clear path from one idea to the next. A logical structure might move from the RBA’s role, to how interest rates work, to the real-world effect on borrowers. What matters is that paragraphs connect — each building on the one before — and that transitional language helps readers see how ideas relate.
What markers scan for
- A logical sequence moving from role to mechanism to real-world effect, or another clear progression.
- Transitional language — ‘as a result’, ‘because of this’, ‘this means’ — that shows how ideas relate.
- Paragraphs that build on each other rather than listing disconnected points.
Score Bands
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Basic
Lacks a clear sequence; ideas jump around and readers struggle to follow the explanation.
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Strong
Organised logically and most ideas are connected; readers can follow the explanation from start to finish.
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Excellent
Structure is clear and purposeful; transitional language guides readers; each paragraph builds on what came before.
Audience & Purpose
This explanation is written for ordinary Australians, not economists. Technical terms must be explained when they first appear, examples must be relatable, and language should be accessible without being patronising. Connecting interest rates to personal experience — mortgage payments, rising costs — is crucial for this task.
What markers scan for
- Technical terms — ‘cash rate’, ‘inflation’, ‘monetary policy’, ‘variable-rate mortgage’ — explained clearly.
- Real-world examples and connections that show why ordinary Australians should care.
- Language that is accessible without slipping into vagueness or condescension.
Score Bands
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Basic
Uses technical language without explaining it, or oversimplifies; the connection to ordinary lives is weak or missing.
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Strong
Technical terms are mostly explained; examples are relatable; readers understand why the topic matters.
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Excellent
Technical terms are explained clearly; examples are specific and relatable; readers see how this directly affects their lives.
Now read · Student sample
What the Reserve Bank Does
Year 9 sample · \~350 words
Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 9 student in Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia.
The Reserve Bank of Australia is Australia's central bank, which means it has responsibility for the economy's health. It does several important things. One of its main jobs is managing monetary policy, which is a big part of how the government tries to keep inflation under control. The RBA also manages the financial system and it prints the money. The main goal of the RBA is to try to keep inflation between two and three percent. This is important because if inflation gets too high, things cost too much and people's money becomes worth less. One of the main tools the RBA uses to control inflation is the cash rate. The cash rate is the interest rate on overnight loans between banks. When the RBA decides to raise the cash rate, the commercial banks have to raise the lending rates that they charge to customers. This means that when the RBA raises rates, it becomes more expensive to borrow money from banks. Higher interest rates make borrowing cost more, so people and businesses spend less money. When people spend less, the prices of things go down, which means inflation comes down. The opposite happens when the RBA lowers rates—borrowing becomes cheaper, people spend more, prices go up and inflation rises. So basically the RBA uses the cash rate as a tool to control how much people spend, which controls inflation. For ordinary Australians, the effects of the RBA's decisions are very real. Most Australians have a variable-rate mortgage, which means the interest they pay can change. When the RBA raises the cash rate, these people have to pay more money every month to the bank. In 2022, Australia experienced significant rate rises because inflation was very high, and this meant many Australians' mortgage payments went up a lot. This makes it harder for families to pay their bills and save money. On the other hand, people who have savings in a bank get higher interest rates too, so they earn more money on their savings. But for most people, the effect of rising rates is negative because they owe more money on mortgages than they have in savings.
