Making inferences is essential to comprehending text. Teachers can ask inferential questions, model their thinking, and teach specific strategies to support upper elementary students in making inferences while reading.

This Teaching and Learning Guide highlights how early childhood teachers can support emotional intelligence and inferential comprehension by drawing children's attention to characters' feelings and by asking students to notice evidence from the illustrations and text. During this read-aloud in Ms. Clark's first grade classroom, we see evidence of…

Generating accurate inferences is crucial for the successful comprehension of text and is a skill that needs to be supported starting in the early grades. Teachers can support inference-making during read-aloud lessons by asking inferential questions and providing scaffolding and feedback on students' inference-making. In this article, we describe…

Although much is known about supporting preschoolers' alphabet knowledge, less is known about instructional moves that support preschoolers' narrative comprehension or how preschoolers' developing cognitive skills may support their narrative comprehension development. This school-university partnership project examined relations of preschoolers'…

Much attention has been paid to storybook reading as a context for supporting preschoolers' emergent language and literacy. Inferential thinking is essential to listening comprehension and to reading comprehension. Understanding the story deeply and reasoning about events and characters are central to children's enjoyment and to comprehension…

This article addresses a growing call for the use of more culturally relevant texts and pedagogy in classrooms. We present how a teacher sharing power with emergent bilingual (EB) students during read-aloud discussions with culturally relevant texts supports EB students' literacy opportunities. These opportunities include (1) initiating new topics…

Fifth graders interpreted the book "Doll Bones" by Holly Black through visual representations from the beginning to the end of the book. Each visual representation was analyzed to determine how students responded. Most frequently, they moved to inferential ways of understanding. Students often visually interpreted emotional plot elements…

In this article, the authors report findings from a yearlong study that addressed teaching first-grade students to make inferences and engage in inferential discussion about children's literature. Because of the importance of both inferencing and discussion for comprehension, a collaborative team of two researchers and a classroom teacher focused…

Teachers balance many goals when selecting texts for small-group reading. The author explored the impact of one variable that teachers consider, quantitative text difficulty, on students' participation, discussion, comprehension, and fluency in small-group discussions of informational science texts. Six bilingual third graders identified as…

The authors address instruction in morphological analysis, a vocabulary-learning approach that involves teaching students the meanings of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and word roots and a strategy for using knowledge of these morphemic elements to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words. The authors discuss their development of a list of affixes…

Evidence is a cultural tool for engaging in a variety of knowledge production practices including observation, inference making, argumentation, persuasion, and explanation. Identifying and using evidence, as called for in many learning standards, is necessary but not sufficient for understanding the concepts and purposes of evidence. Before…

This article explains how to create and use a daybook in the literacy classroom. Readers learn what a daybook is, how the daybook in one fourth and fifth grade classroom is structured, and how students in this classroom use that daybook during reading instruction to engage, record important information, and discuss a text.

Inference generation makes a strong, unique contribution to reading comprehension. Young children engage in many of the same inference generation processes as sophisticated readers. This article discusses instructional practices that can be used in prekindergarten through grade two to help children think beyond the words of the text. Suggestions…

Understanding relies on the reader's ability to "read between the lines" and connect textual evidence with their own experience, knowledge and beliefs. The Common Core State Standards highlight the importance of using text-based evidence to develop arguments and support interpretations, including analysis and appreciation of author's craft. In…

The activities described in this article, Prediction Path and Quotation Cafe, are adapted from the IRA book "Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12." They highlight the reading comprehension habit of making inferences and predictions, which can be used across content areas and grade levels. In creating this toolkit of activities, the…