Teaching Students to Make Inferences

Inferring is the process of drawing personal meaning from a text. We ask students to draw conclusions from their own prior knowledge, their knowledge of pronouns and antecedents, and their knowledge of the relationship between explicitly stated information and implied information.

View this page from this website for further examples and specific ways to teach students to infer.

• Refer to page 63 in your Beers text, When Kids Can't Read,  for more explanation of these skills..

Skilled readers:

Recognize the antecedents for pronouns
Figure out the meaning of unknown words from context clues
Figure out the grammatical function of an unknown word
Understand intonation of characters' words
Identify characters' beliefs, personalities, and motivations
Understand characters' relationships to one another
Provide details about the setting
Provide explanations for events or ideas that are presented in the text
Offer details for events or their own explanations of the events presented in the text
Understand the author's view of the "world" view
Recognize the author's biases
Relate what is happening in the text to their own knowledge of the world
Offer conclusions from facts presented into he text

• Also view these 21 Learning Strategies from http://www.nclrc.org/21strategies.htm

Each of these could be a separate reading mini lesson for your students.