General Scoring Guidelines
Articulation and Dialect Differences
For all Acadience Reading measures, 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 on FSF for saying that the first sound in the word see is /th/. 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 someone retesting the student who is more familiar with the student’s articulation or dialect.
Use of the Schwa Sound
The schwa sound is the /u/ sound added to some consonant sounds. In particular, the voiced consonant sounds such as /b/, /d/, and /g/ are difficult to produce without adding a schwa, i.e., “buh” for /b/. Although teachers are encouraged to model pure production of sounds in their instruction, there is no penalty for students using the schwa sound when producing isolated consonant sounds during Acadience Reading assessment.
General Acadience Reading Reminders
Each measure includes specific reminder prompts. In addition to those reminders, there are two general reminders that apply to all individually administered measures that include written material (LNF, NWF, and ORF):
- If the student stops and it is not a hesitation on a specific item, say Keep going. This reminder may be used as often as needed.
- If the student loses his/her place, point. This reminder may be used as often as needed.
Response Patterns
At the end of each Acadience Reading administration, it is optional but often valuable to note student response patterns in the scoring booklet. 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
Acadience Reading measures are 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.
Acadience Reading 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. Do not prorate the scores.
The individual chapters for each measure describe how to mark and score the student responses for that measure. The following rules apply to most Acadience Reading measures:
- An underline denotes a correct response. This rule applies to PSF and NWF.
- A slash mark denotes an incorrect response.
- When there is both a slash and an underline, the slash overrides the underline and the response is counted as incorrect.
- An “sc” written above a slashed response denotes a self-correction, and the response is counted as correct. The only exception is the Whole Words Read (WWR) score from NWF. The student receives a point for WWR only if the student’s first and only response for that word is correct and complete.
- When a student provides multiple responses for the same item on LNF, ORF, or Correct Letter Sounds (CLS) from NWF, the responses are treated as self-corrections and the student’s final response is scored.
For more information please see the Assessment Manual located on the
Acadience® Reading K–6 download page.