Reading Comprehension Strategy: Making Inferences Helen Chaney Hannah Mayer Jarelie Mcafee Shannon Reaves LITR 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 knowledge  Allows 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-based  Requires putting 2 or more pieces of information from the text together By 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 Pearson Custom Education: Developing literacy: LITR New York: Pearson Learning Solutions, p