State trainer walks teachers through ALO assessment platform, flags device and scoring pitfalls

Theresa, a trainer with the Utah State Board of Education, led a remote training session on the ALO platform for Acadience reading measures on Feb. 5, covering how to score benchmark and progress-monitoring assessments, device requirements, and procedures for handling discontinued or invalidated tests. The session included multiple practice items and question-and-answer exchanges with participating teachers.

Theresa said the ALO scoring interface uses a bottom “pill” bar to record correct (green), incorrect (red) and skipped (blank) responses and a black top bar to show special rules. She described the platform’s timing and prompts: after three seconds of no response the system displays the wait reminder; a one‑minute stop screen ends a passage and gives the assessor about one second to mark a final item; and “the first five sounds, if they get the first five incorrect, it does a discontinue,” she said. The trainer recommended deleting and rescoring mistaken inputs in real time rather than letting the system discontinue incorrectly.

Teachers pressed on practical challenges. Multiple participants raised the same problem: ALO requires a touch-screen device at tablet size or larger. “It has to be a touch screen device, so either an iPad, a tablet, a Chromebook, or a touch screen laptop,” Theresa said; she added a mouse-driven laptop does not permit scoring on ALO. That constraint led the trainer to recommend districts provide suitable hardware or arrange alternate training sessions so staff can get hands-on practice.

The session addressed scoring nuances for each measure. On first-sound fluency Theresa explained scoring rules for blends and schwas: “If they combine the initial phoneme with another consonant or a vowel, they only get 1 point,” she said, and schwas are generally ignored. For phoneme segmentation and nonsense-word fluency she emphasized the difficulty of scoring fast or segmented readers and recommended a two‑hand technique and a “cursive” swiping motion to keep up with fluent students. She warned that nonsense-word fluency is the hardest measure to score and encouraged repeated practice.

Theresa also reviewed retell scoring and the maze assessment workflow. Assessors score retells with a small wheel or plus/minus controls and must rate quality of response after a brief prompt. For the maze assessment (MAZE) she explained assessors generate a student login code that expires after 40 minutes and that the system supports both touchscreen and non-touchscreen student devices for MAZE (students can use Chromebooks), while teacher-administered measures require a touchscreen device.

On implementation and reporting, Theresa noted the state ran an RFP for the reading platform and awarded the contract to ALO; she said the ALO platform uses the same Acadience measures and cut scores and allows historical comparisons. She also described procedures for invalidated assessments: “Invalidated scores do need to be reported to your assessment director, and then they get reported to me at the state level,” she said.

For follow-up, Theresa said she will post the recording and other materials to the USBE assessment YouTube page and will create a Canvas course in July with additional practice audios and benchmark sets. She advised teachers who could not practice during the session because of device constraints to arrange alternate sessions through their district or charter assessment directors.

The USBE trainer answered multiple participant questions about correct handling of inserted sounds, when to mark answers blank vs. incorrect, how to correct marks after the timer stops, and strategies for keeping pace with fluent students. The session closed with a description of progress‑monitoring enrollment and group permissions for paraprofessionals and instructions for obtaining local administrative support and device shortcuts.

The state did not take any formal policy votes during the training; the session was instructional and intended to support district and charter assessment staff ahead of the upcoming benchmark periods. Follow-up resources promised by the trainer include the Canvas course (available in July) and recordings on the USBE assessment YouTube page; districts were urged to provide touchscreen devices for teacher-administered measures and to contact assessment directors with questions.