Hi Daria,
It’s no secret that kindergarten today looks different than kindergarten many decades ago. Formal reading instruction begins earlier than it once did. Yet, the question of how much alphabetics and phonics instruction we expect young students to learn has always been contentious (Snow, Burns, and Griffin wrote about this in their landmark 1998 report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children).
What we know is that, in addition to kindergarten being the time to facilitate language development, social and school expectations, self-regulation, and motor development, among other things, it is also the essential time to develop alphabet knowledge. Isolated letter-sound instruction is less effective than instruction that integrates letter learning with phonemic awareness and phonics activities. So, once students recognize a few letter-sound correspondences, teachers should introduce blending to read simple words. All this means decoding instruction begins once students know a few letter sounds- usually in kindergarten, as reflected in the Common Core State Standards. Although most states have adopted their own standards that align with the Common Core but provide more specificity, I’ll continue to refer to the Common Core for generalization purposes. The Common Core expects students to read common high-frequency words (regular and irregular) “by sight” (RF.K.3.C) and know the most frequent consonant sounds and the five major vowel sounds (RF.K.3.A; RF.K.3.B). If you’re interested in learning more about the evidence behind foundational reading skills or want guidance on implementation or common obstacles, I’d recommend looking at the IES Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade educator’s practice guide.
Neither standards nor research provide us with a concrete number for how many high-frequency words (regular and irregular) a student should be able to read by the end of the year. Programs also vary pretty significantly in the number of words introduced. Frankly, your school’s 91-word list does seem a bit random. It’s a very specific number, and I can’t guess where it came from. What is the intended purpose of this 91-word test? Is it to identify students who are at risk? If that’s the case, it is important to have summative assessment data that help us track whether students are learning what we teach in our curriculum and adjust accordingly based on their responses. But, summative assessments from programs aren’t necessarily the best predictors for later reading outcomes. When we are trying to identify students at risk, our best tool is a normed universal screener. In kindergarten, it is common for a screening instrument to include a word-reading measure as a part of the assessment. When this measure has solid psychometric evidence, it can be used to identify students who may be at risk for reading difficulties.
Universal screeners are typically timed for a couple of reasons, one being that it’s an acceptable proxy to measure automaticity. Students need to have automaticity with skills because this effortless retrieval of things like word reading is what allows readers to focus attention on more complicated tasks, like analyzing what is read. I’d guess that the expected grading criterion you described (where students are expected to read the word without decoding) is trying to measure the same thing. The problem is that in kindergarten, students are still acquiring the skill of word-reading, and very few have developed fluency. In other words, kids are still sounding out words to decode them. I’d much prefer a student who builds the habit of sounding out words rather than guessing.
What I worry about in the assessment you described is that there may be a tendency for teachers (and parents) to resort to the harmful practice of asking students to memorize a weekly list of words in an attempt to teach to this test. Instead, educators must teach students to decode words. This is definitely hard to do with irregular words (or “tricky” words, as your program calls them). You may find our Heart Word Deep Dive relevant as you continue to review research on the topic.
I hope the resources I’ve passed along are helpful. Thank you for your curiosity!
