by Dr. Jack Dempsey, Director of Research
What Our Eyes Reveal About Our Minds
To understand how readers extract meaning from text, it is important to understand detailed information relating to their behaviors while reading. Although reading speed and oral fluency can speak to some level of reading proficiency, these metrics do not reveal specific information about the processes by which text is comprehended. Reading researchers often take advantage of the “eye-mind link”, or the fact that the focus of our attention usually corresponds to where we are looking. Eye-tracking research makes use of this eye-mind link, allowing us to better understand the mind and the brain. The applications of this range from devices to aid in the diagnosis of brain disorders, as recently developed by a team of researchers at the University of Houston, to developing our understanding of how people comprehend written texts.
Eye-tracking helps us clear up some misconceptions about how we read. For instance, it is commonly thought that eyes move across a page of text smoothly, but that is not the case. As we read, we make a series of fixations connected by rapid eye-movements known as saccades. It’s also commonly assumed that everything is read; however, many words are never fixated on. The tendency to skip words is not random. Skipped words tend to be shorter and also very frequent. Proficient readers often process words like the, at, and was outside of the focal point of their vision, called the ‘parafovea’. On the other hand, about 30% of words are reread in typical text reading, further demonstrating that reading is not always a strictly linear process. These innate behaviors occur rapidly, on the scale of milliseconds, but they are nevertheless vital for our understanding of reading comprehension.
These findings contradict many core tenets of so-called “speed reading programs,” which are actively debunked by research. By examining the following eye-movement patterns, we can better understand how changes in text change reading behaviors:
- How long we fixate on a particular part of the text
- Where we fixate following difficult parts of text
- How much time we spend rereading
- How often we skip short or frequent words
Cascade Reading Eye-Tracking Study
These eye-tracking measures become even more powerful when coupled with reading comprehension data, allowing us to examine how differences in reading behaviors influence understanding of the text. To this end, we conducted an eye-tracking study with 80 adult native English readers at the University of Illinois. Half of these participants read passages in the Cascade Format while the other half read passages in traditional text formatting. After these passages, readers were asked questions targeting their understanding of basic information from the texts (e.g., who did what to whom?). This was first administered without eye-tracking to familiarize participants to the task before having them read different passages while their eye-movements were recorded.
Results not only showed that participants scored better on comprehension assessments when reading in the Cascade Format (see Figure 1), but analysis of reading behaviors also revealed that the Cascade Format led to overall less rereading and higher amounts of skipping (see Figure 2 and Figure 3, respectively). Looking at previous research, we know that rereading tends to aid in the comprehension of texts, and skipping is a systematic behavior that enables efficient reading behaviors. The fact that the Cascade Format led to better comprehension while at the same time decreasing time spent rereading and increasing the number of words skipped suggests that reading efficiency is also boosted in addition to reading comprehension.
Figure 1. Comprehension performance to questions asked after reading each passage. The filled in circles represent mean scores by format, and the error bars represent standard deviation from the mean.
Figure 2. Average rereading times across formats. Each circle represents a mean rereading time for a particular participant. The boxplots represent the range of average rereading times between the 25th and 75th percentiles, and vertical lines represent the span of the minimum and maximum average rereading times. The black line represents the median rereading time across all participants, and the black diamond represents the mean rereading time across all participants.
Figure 3. Average word-skipping rates across formats. Each circle represents a mean word-skipping rate for a particular participant. The boxplots represent the range of mean word-skipping rates between the 25th and 75th percentiles, and vertical lines represent the span of the minimum and maximum word-skipping rates. The black line represents the median word-skipping rate across all participants, and the black diamond represents the mean word-skipping rate across all participants.
Cascade Reading Supports Reading Comprehension and Reading Efficiency
These data together show that the Cascade Format leads to improvements in both reading comprehension and reading efficiency, defined as the ability to accurately interpret information in a timely manner. These results are very encouraging and complement previous research showing that adult native English and ELL readers, as well as elementary readers, benefit from the Cascade Format. By using the visual cues provided by the Cascade Format, readers can more readily understand the texts they read.
But the research does not stop there! We are hard at work with studies investigating best implementation practices, how the Cascade Format can be best leveraged to help students with reading disabilities, and how it can help in the language learning context. If you are interested in trying Cascade Reading to help your student readers, we’d love to hear from you!
Please Contact: research@cascadereading.com to learn more about how you can implement these tools into your curriculum and to explore whether we might be able to collaborate to ensure the best outcomes for your students.
