This paper reports on a study concerning the social nature of young students' informal inferential reasoning. Employing inferentialism as a background theory, we examine cognitive and sociocultural aspects of reasoning that arose during group discussions as well as trace relations between those aspects. Following a design experiment approach, we…

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.

Science educators now broadly recognize the multimodal nature of learning in science, where learners make meanings within modes (linguistic, mathematical, visual, and actional) by using the conventions of different sign systems or grammars in these modes. However, how teachers guide students to link and infer new meanings across modes, called…

A referential metaphor is a cohesive tie between lexical items that are metaphorically related, (e.g. "'The seagull' took the bread from the coffee table. No one heard the 'thief'"). The reference from "the thief" back to "the seagull" is metaphorical because thieves are human. The present article presents arguments…

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…

Successful comprehension is only possible when children draw inferences about ideas implicit or missing in discourse. Supporting inference-making with explicit instruction must start early given its importance in comprehension and knowledge development. However, students who experience difficulties with early reading skills often do not receive…

Successful comprehension is only possible when children draw inferences about ideas implicit or missing in discourse. Supporting inference-making with explicit instruction must start early given its importance in comprehension and knowledge development. However, students who experience difficulties with early reading skills often do not receive…

Inference-making is a central element of successful reading comprehension, yet provides a challenge for beginning readers. Text decoding takes up cognitive resources which prevents beginning readers from successful inference-making and compromises reading comprehension. Listening does not require any decoding and could therefore offer a less…

Most students have interacted with scientific representations that are used as teaching resources in schools. Often these external representations present challenges for understanding. By utilizing a framework based on an inferential, epistemic approach to scientific representations, we have analyzed students' representational constructions of the…

Today's world is characterized by the extensive production of data in different scenarios that everyday citizens need to understand for their informed participation in society. With the increase in the availability of data in a society defined by the industrious production of data, the educational system needs to think of possibilities to bring…

Given the relevance of graphs of functions, we consider their inclusion in primary education from the functional approach to early algebra. The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the students' production and reading of graphs when they solved generalization problems from a functional thinking approach. We aim to explore how 3rd and…

Peer-mediated instructional strategies (e.g., peer tutoring) have been effective at teaching academic responses in previous research. This study extended the literature by programming for inference-making, or derived relations. Across two experiments, researchers investigated the use of peer tutoring and inference-making to teach…

Background: The present study aimed to examine and compare the relative contributions of three facets of metalinguistic awareness (phonological awareness, orthographic awareness and morphological awareness) and lexical inferencing ability to Chinese reading comprehension across upper elementary grades. Method: Fifty-three third graders, 79 fourth…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of extended vocabulary instruction on the expressive vocabulary of two third-grade students with vocabulary deficits. According to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (n.d.), students in third grade should be able to determine the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases…

Teachers who engage primary school students in informal statistical inference (ISI) must themselves have good content knowledge of ISI (ISI-CK). However, little is known about how college education for pre-service teachers can contribute to the development of their ISI-CK. To address this shortcoming, we used a case study to investigate ISI-CK…