Acadience Reading 7-8: General Scoring Guidelines

Articulation and Dialect Differences

During the OR measure, students are never penalized for articulation or dialect differences that are part of their typical speech. For example, a student who typically says /th/ for /s/ would not be penalized for pronouncing the word see as thee. It is helpful for assessors to be familiar with the speech patterns of the students they assess. If a student has articulation or dialect differences that are difficult to understand, consider having someone who is more familiar with the student’s articulation or dialect retest the student.

Response Patterns

At the end of administering an Acadience Reading 7–8 measure, it is optional but often valuable to note any response patterns that are observed. Making a note of any noticeable or recurring student response patterns provides information about how the student performed on specific items and what types of errors were made.

This information may be useful for planning instruction. These notes are especially useful if the person testing the student is different from the person who will be teaching the student.

Recording and Scoring Responses

The OR measure is designed to be recorded and scored in real time as the student is responding. At times, it will be necessary to make a quick judgment about a student’s response. It is important to use your best professional judgment and move on. Audio recording is not recommended. The amount of time required to listen to and score recordings afterward makes the assessment inefficient. Additionally, it is often more difficult to score from audio recordings than scoring live due to poor sound quality and background noise.

The Maze and OR measures are designed so that most students will not complete a measure within the time limit. For those few students who do, simply record the score achieved if administering with paper and pencil (do not pro-rate).  If you are using ALO to assess, the software will record and display the correct score automatically .

The Acadience Reading 7–8 Assessment Manual describes how to mark and score the student responses for each measure using paper and pencil administration. The following rules apply to multiple Acadience Reading 7–8 measures, as noted:

• A slash mark denotes an incorrect response (Maze, SR, OR).
• If a student marks more than one answer, the response is counted as an error (Maze, SR).
• If there are erasure marks, crossed out options (bubbles or distractor words), or any other extraneous markings and the student’s final response is obvious, score the item based on that response. If the marking is ambiguous, score the item as incorrect (Maze, SR).

For more information please see the Assessment Manual located on the Acadience Resource Hub.