By VP of Research Dr. Jack Dempsey
Over the past five years, Cascade Reading has been hard at work testing the efficacy and scope of our revolutionary format to support literacy skills. From longitudinal studies in real classrooms, to eye-tracking experiments uncovering the physiological processes involved, and to attitudinal survey research, we continue to show a variety of benefits enjoyed by readers who use the Cascade Format. In this blog series, we are going to focus on three separate dimensions:
January: Core Literacy Benefits
February: Affective, Attitudinal, and Motivational Benefits
March: Accessibility Benefits
Comprehension Benefits
First and foremost, the Cascade Format was designed to improve reading comprehension outcomes.
We now have four separate studies, including two longitudinal studies with 4th and 5th graders and two studies with adult readers, both native English speakers and English Language Learners, showing improved comprehension when reading with the Cascade Format.
Specifically, a semester-long longitudinal study with elementary students in a Wisconsin public school shows significant improvements in comprehension question accuracy to reading passages as students continue to read with the Cascade Format. This is illustrated in the left panel of the Figure below, where you can clearly see that students reading with the Cascade Format began to see better comprehension scores early on into the intervention. When those students switched, so that now students who were reading in traditional text were now reading in the Cascade Format and vice versa, students who spent half the semester reading in Cascade showed a sustained higher comprehension trend, indicative of a critical transfer effect, as illustrated in the right panel of the Figure below.
This is huge – it means students not only enjoy comprehension benefits while reading with the Cascade Format but may also maintain those benefits when reading traditional text formatting as well.
Cascade Reading Targets Core Skills
We were naturally driven to figure out exactly how the Cascade Format succeeded so well in improving comprehension outcomes for both adult and elementary readers. In this same longitudinal study above, we asked students to report how well they could hear how sentences should should, which is an important indicator of phrasing ability. Students reading with the Cascade Format reported a much higher ability to generate this auditory information while silently reading, suggesting the Cascade Format improves comprehension by improving readers’ abilities to accurately interpret sentences as they read.
This connection was corroborated by our year-long expert cohort study, where several elementary school teachers reported higher Oral Reading Fluency scores after implementing the Cascade Format in classes as young as Kindergarten and 1st Grade. More recently, we found evidence from another longitudinal study with elementary students that exposure to the Cascade Format improves syntactic knowledge over the course of a semester. This growth in comprehension was directly and significantly related to Oral Reading Fluency and comprehension abilities, as shown in the Figure below.
Taken together, results suggest Cascade improved young readers’ comprehension by scaffolding fluency and syntax.
Changing how we read
These findings are further supported by a recently published eye-tracking study showing improved reading efficiency alongside comprehension when adult readers were presented with texts in the Cascade Format. Moreover, results from our published study with English Language Learners suggests these benefits may be even greater for those from non-English backgrounds. Cascade Reading doesn’t just help people learn to read – it changes how we read for the better.
