Reading Comprehension Strategy: Making Inferences

Helen Chaney Hannah MayerJarelie Mcafee Shannon ReavesLITR 3130 C

Purpose of Making Inferences

Making inferences helps us read between the lines to fill in details the author has not directly stated.

We make inferences when we have to put together 2 or more pieces of information.

Making inferences helps students to interact with the text.

2 Types of Inferences Schema-based

Depends on prior knowledgeAllows reader to elaborate by adding

implied information“They rode into the sunset.” From this quote, we can infer that it’s late in the day and they are riding west.

Text-basedRequires putting 2 or more pieces of

information from the text togetherBy reading, “Peanuts have more food energy than sugar and a pound of peanut butter has more protein than thirty-two eggs, but more fat than ice cream,” the reader can infer peanuts are nutritious, but fattening.

Prior knowledge-prediction strategy

The teacher reads the story and analyzes it for 2 or 3 important ideas.

For each important idea, the teacher creates a previous experience question.eg. Have you ever…?

For each of these questions, a prediction question is created.eg. What do you think will happen?

Students read the story and check their predictions.

Predictions are discussed and inferential questions are discussed.

Sources

Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions. Cuesta College. Retrieved from http://academic.cuesta.edu/acaupp/AS/309.HTM

Pearson Custom Education: Developing literacy: LITR 3130. New York: Pearson Learning Solutions, p. 378-380.