by Dr. Jack Dempsey, Director of Research
Part of what makes the scientific process so powerful is our ability to replicate, or retest, previous findings. Replicating previous research findings is vital, especially in educational settings where the costs of the oft-lamented replicability crisis can be devastating for students and their learning outcomes. Not only are the outcomes important, but educators need to put in many hours of work to incorporate new ideas and tools into their curriculum, which, as Sarah Schwartz from Education Week points out, can make putting science into practice challenging. Educators need to be sure that their efforts don’t go to waste!
That is why we strive not only to show initial evidence for how the Cascade Format improves reading comprehension, but we also continue to add to our evidence base. Back in the Fall of 2021, we showed how the Cascade Format improves reading comprehension for 4th and 5th graders (publication under review). Since then, we’ve also shown in a recent peer-reviewed publication, Linguistically-driven text formatting improves reading comprehension for ELLs and EL1s, how the Cascade Format improves comprehension for adults from various language backgrounds, and we are excited to soon share eye-tracking research as well! All of these efforts are important for expanding our evidence base, but replicating previous work allows us to solidify our evidence base.
New Year-Long Study Replicates Previous Findings for Elementary Students
Last year, we had the opportunity to share the Cascade Format with another school district in Wisconsin. Students in 4th and 5th read leveled texts from our Passage Library and answered questions assessing their comprehension over the course of a full school year. As in our Fall 2021 study, halfway through this research collaboration, we switched the student groups to ensure all students had a chance to benefit from Cascade Reading. Just like before, when students read in the Cascade Format, their scores on our comprehension assessments were greater by an average of 5 percentage points. This is similar to our Fall 2021 study findings, strengthening our evidence that the Cascade Format really works!
Figure 1. Reading comprehension performance in Fall 2023. Error bars represent standard error around the mean.
What’s Next?
Demonstrating our product’s efficacy through an initial rigorous process is important, but it is equally important to show that your effects are consistent and reliable. By replicating our Fall 2021 findings with this new elementary school study, students, parents, and educators can rest assured that the Cascade Format has the power to change reading comprehension for the good. As we continue to spread the word and grow our user base, we also continue to collect assessment, neurobehavioral, and eye-movement data from readers from cerebrodiverse and multilingual backgrounds. All these efforts help us better understand how we can best serve students and educators, which is important because, like learning, science is a process. It must be attended to with hard work and determination to ensure the best outcomes. We can’t wait to share even more positive research findings with you in the coming months, so stay tuned!
Director of Research, Cascade Reading
