By VP of Research Dr. Jack Dempsey
Cascade Reading offers educators, learners, and readers everywhere multiple ways of incorporating our patented technology into their everyday lives, classrooms, and digital text environments to improve reading and learning outcomes. As teachers prepare for the next semester and new year, we wanted to share some ways that their colleagues have already implemented Cascade Reading and enjoyed its benefits. We talked with three educators who have used Cascade Reading in their own classrooms to shared a nuanced and rich understanding of how Cascade Reading is being used by real teachers across the country.
Overcoming Barriers
We first spoke with Donell Pons, a Reading Specialist and Literacy Advocate from Utah. Donell teaches literacy and reading skills to adult learners with reading difficulties. Going all the way back to our presentation at the Scientific Studies of Reading in 2022, she has been very interested in how Cascade Reading can help her students. Specifically, she’s found that offering texts that would otherwise be read in traditional text formatting through the Cascade Reader View has improved reader confidence, comprehension, and enjoyment. “Right away, I’m thinking, this is a tool I can use in many ways, [like] helping reduce problems due to overload of visual information. I’ve done it two different ways: the lessons are very, very helpful…[and] I offer my students to read [their texts] in Cascade, and hands down every time they choose Cascade Reader. Their fluency, accuracy, and understanding they feel is better.” Her students with ADHD and/or Dyslexia, who tend to prefer the Cascade Format when reading according to recent data, have specifically taken quite a liking to the Cascade Reader View, sharing their feelings that it’s “just so much easier for [me] to read…it almost phrased it for me [and] made sense to me, to my ear.” They also reported understanding how pronouns like ‘this’ in larger, connected texts referred to specific antecedents earlier in the text. Last but not least, her students enjoyed learning from the Cascade Passage Library. Not only did some students report learning more about the topics than they had previously done in school, they also reportedly enjoyed comparing lower grade level texts to higher ones, saying it helped them better understand what it means to “improve” their reading ability.Focusing on What Matters
We also reached out to Samantha Varano, a principal at Ursuline Academy in Wilmington, Delaware, who began using Cascade for her elementary students last January. Her students read several passages weekly from the Passage Library and answered questions targeting basic comprehension of events from what they read. They also found that students grew particularly in their syntactic knowledge.
Samantha points out that Cascade Reading “allowed [her] staff and [she] to have fruitful conversations about syntax, not the most exciting topic), how students read, the pace at which they read…and [it] improved my teachers’ attention to [these] particular skills.”
Learning English AND Learning to Read
Last but not least, we spoke with an adult ESL program Administrator from Oregon about how she has used Cascade Reading for her students learning to read AND learning the English language for the first time. In her own words:
“We are an adult ESL program, and many of our students are emergent readers in addition to English learners. In our literacy classes, Cascade Reading is used to help students read the reading passages in our textbook, which are not otherwise the most accessible for our emergent reader population.”
“I’ve had one group of students have a visual “aha” moment when I gave them a passage…They said it was “better.”
Cascade Reading has many uses! It can be used to help elementary students become better readers at a critical age. It can be used to help challenged readers, nonliterate adults, readers with neurodivergent profiles, and English Language Learners all feel more confident and understand more when they read. There are many ways to implement Cascade Reading into the classroom, your learning program, or your everyday life. If you want to hear more or have any questions, please contact us at info@cascadereading.com.
We’d also love to hear from you if you’ve been using Cascade Reading – please consider filling out the following short survey about your experiences!
