3. How to Teach Inferencing

In this section we’re going to walk you through teaching inferencing with each of four different sources of information:

• A picture
• A read-aloud
• A sentence
• A decodable text

In each of those examples — and any time you’re teaching inferencing, regardless of the type of text — the goal of teaching inference is to show students how to:

• Think about what they hear or read
• Recognize that some information may be missing
• Look for visual or verbal clues the author may provide
• Activate their related background knowledge
• Connect this knowledge to what the author explicitly states
• Make meaning by taking information from various sources and filling in the gaps
• Confirm or change the inferences students make as they gain more information by reading or listening

We can expect that some students will struggle with these skills and, thus, to make the necessary connections that inferencing requires. The good news is that we can teach our students how to perform each of these mental processes with explicit instruction — and that’s our focus in this skill explainer. 

PLEASE NOTE: it is also difficult for students to make inferences when their background knowledge does not include critical information. Learn more about teaching background knowledge on our sister site Reading Rockets (opens in new window).

Prepare for Instruction: Graphic Organizers

Every time you teach inferencing, you can use a simple graphic organizer and clear guiding questions to model how and when inferencing occurs and to guide your students’ thinking process while they read. Once you teach them how to do this, they can repeat the steps (sometimes with scaffolding from you) for any type of text.

Here are two types of graphic organizers you can use in your classroom:

Graphic Organizer #1

This graphic organizer is most suitable for young children. The images prompt students to identify information from each source to make an inference.

Graphic Organizer #2

This graphic organizer is most suitable for older students who are accurate decoders and are able to read the words in each of the boxes. 

We hope you'll download both of these graphic organizers to use in your classroom.

As you prepare for your lesson, you'll want to plan questions that can help students pull information from various sources into the graphic organizers. Some of those questions may be:

1. What facts/actions/emotions can we piece together from the text to help us fill in the gaps?
2. What are the facts/actions/emotions that we can see in the picture that relate to what we read in the text?
3. What information do we have from our own knowledge or experience to fill more gaps in our understanding?
4. What do we infer when we connect all of those pieces of information?
5. What else do we need to know to fully understand the text?
6. Do the answers to these questions change or confirm our thinking/reasoning?