Cascade Blog

Notes on reading, research, and how we're building Cascade.

Research summaries, product updates, and what we're learning about reading comprehension.

Aug 20, 2024

How Cascade Reading Helps Struggling Older Students Improve Their Literacy Skills

Learn about Cascade Reading, a digital tool developed with the expertise of Julie Van Dyke, that aids struggling readers by breaking down complex sentences for better understanding.

Product Updates

Jul 30, 2024

Expanded Passage Library Offers 195 Leveled Passage Sets and Comprehension Assessments

by Michele Landis and Dr. Jack Dempsey Our reading technology is best utilized as a school-wide, integrated tool within any literacy curriculum, so students can leverage Cascaded Text whenever they need the support. As teachers across the nation have already discovered, the new Cascade Format offers an alternative to the centuries-old block text to improve […]

Research

Jul 17, 2024

New Data from Elementary Students Reconfirms Power of Cascade Reading

Part of what makes the scientific process so powerful is our ability to replicate, or retest, previous findings.

News

Jul 9, 2024

Lunch & Lit with Cascade Reading’s Julie Van Dyke

Julie was recently featured on the weekly The Right to Read Project Lunch & Lit webinar series discussing The Role of Syntactic Parsing In Comprehension. The weekly Lunch & Lit aims to bridge the research to practice divide by bringing scientists and practitioners together to discuss their work. The Barksdale Reading Institute’s Lunch & Lit […]

Educational Insights

Jun 4, 2024

Incorporating Cascade Reading into the Classroom – Part 3

by Dr. Jack Dempsey and Michele Landis In the first part of this applied series, we showed how the Cascade Explorer Tool and our Chrome Extension could help students in summarization tasks, and our most recent blog discussed how the Cascade Explorer could be used to teach students how to understand and create complex sentences. […]

Educational Insights

Apr 23, 2024

Incorporating Cascade Reading into the Classroom – Part 2

by Dr. Jack Dempsey and Michele Landis How Does Reading Make Students Feel? In the second part of this applied series, we want to highlight some of the subjective benefits of Cascade Reading. Most of our research is focused on showing how the Cascade Format improves reading comprehension outcomes, but it’s also important to make […]

Educational Insights

Mar 25, 2024

Incorporating Cascade Reading into the Classroom

by Dr. Jack Dempsey and Michele Landis How Can Teachers Use Cascade Reading? Many students continue to struggle with reading even if they’ve mastered word-level decoding abilities, hopefully by way of phonics instruction. However, the science of reading does not stop there – young readers need to be able to understand full sentences as well. […]

Product Updates

Mar 11, 2024

Introducing the Cascade Passage Library

by Dr. Jack Dempsey, Director of Research Introduction Our mission at Cascade Reading is to reach as many students as possible to help mitigate the ever-growing reading comprehension crisis. To do this, we have teamed up with several schools and universities to conduct rigorous research and develop our tools in ways that are sensitive to the […]

Podcasts

Mar 7, 2024

Cascade Reading on Embracing New EdTech in the Classroom

Dr. Julie A. Van Dyke, Chief Scientist at Cascade Reading, delves into using edtech to enhance children’s reading comprehension. Today’s classrooms are demanding, making it challenging for teachers to provide individualized support. However, integrating technology into the classroom not only enables personalized instruction but also empowers students with learning difficulties and non-native English speakers. Today, […]