Chapter 5: Learning to Make an Inference

The title of this chapter pretty much sums up what the chapter is about: making inferences and how we can help our students learn how to do this. I guess on some level I knew that inferring was something we had learned at some point in our educational lives, but I never thought about it like that. To me it was something that I just happened to pick up and kept doing, so this chapter helped me really realize that some student can't do this.

The example in the book really illustrated this. The one class who didn't struggle with comprehension made plenty of inferences that came directly from the text. However, the other students who do struggle with comprehension weren't able to make inferences about the text as quickly and when they did get around to it, they modified their answers with phrases like "I don't know" or "this is stupid." It almost seemed to me like the second group of students probably could have made the inferences but they were afraid of being wrong.

This says to me that not only do we need to show student how to make inference by modeling the process for them, but to also show our students that whatever inference they do make might not be wrong, so long as they can support what they are saying with examples from the text.