Vocabulary...Dolch, Fry, Zeno "Oh My"

I am curious by nature, but even more curious to find an answer to a question I do not know.  Recently I had a question about where the sight word list in FAST is generated from.  Through many conversations, some late nights of on-line searching and an email to FAST, here's what I have to share.  Looks like my next little research project will be to read the FAST Technical Manual.  

 
Technical Manual on the development for our Sight Words sub-tests.

This measure is designed to assess whether students are able to recognize common high-frequency words. This is distinct from a decodable word measure in that, though some sight words may be decodable, students recognize them with automaticity rather than utilizing cognitive resources to decode them. Test construction of the screening form and progress monitoring forms differ slightly. The words were selected after review of sight word lists and sight word literature that suggests that sight word lists primarily consist of high frequency words (Pratt, Martin & Christ, 2010). The primary source for high frequency words in printed American English is the Educator’s Word Frequency Guide (Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995). Prior to the development of sight word measures, a study was carried out to administer the first 1,000 words from Zeno's high frequency list to estimate the difficulty of those sight words. Subsequently, the first 50 or 150 sight words were selected for the measure based on an analysis of word difficulty and word frequency. This sight words list is essentially 50-150 of the easiest and highest frequency words.

Some ADDITIONAL "FUN STUFF" to check out:

1.   FAST Technical Manual  (Abbreviated for Iowa 2015-2016)

2.  The Words Students Need, ASCD October 2010 | Volume 68 | Number 2  NOTE:  Great article pertaining to Middle School

3.  The First 4,000 words.  NOTE:  The 4,000 words were drawn from two well-recognized vocabulary lists: Zeno et al.'s The Educator's Word Frequency Guide and Hiebert's Word Zones™ corpus.

4.  Sight Words from the University of Minnesota Research Institute for Problem Solving:  NOTE:  These materials are aligned with the Formative Assessment System for Teachers (FAST) assessments and guidance within each intervention guide is provided to help teachers decide which FAST assessment to use for intervention decision making and progress monitoring, but other assessment systems and tools can be used with the materials