Nonsense Word Reading should be assessed starting winter of Kindergarten and then continue through all three 1st grade screening windows as suggested in the technical manual. As identified in the KSDE screening protocol document which can be found here, nonsense word fluency is a required subtest to be reported spring of 1st grade. Therefore, KSDE requests that decodable words not be used as a substitute for this assessment and that NWF is the assessment that all districts use.

The use of NWF is for a specific assessment purpose (automaticity of a student connecting phonemes and graphemes) and the use of decodable words provides students an option of reading based on prior knowledge and previous orthographic mapping of the word.