Here are two lessons I use to help students understand the difference between what they know and what they infer. The first lesson builds into the second lesson so I recommend using them both in the same order.
The objective of this first lesson is to teach the difference between gathering information that is obvious and making inferences. I begin the lesson with an introduction to the word inference and all of it's forms (correct or incorrect) such as infer and inferencing. I give them an example of how they often infer information in every day life. I demonstrate this by entering the classroom, shaking a wet umbrella. Immediately, the students say, "It's raining!" I ask them how they know and they site two obvious clues: A) I have an umbrella and B) it's a wet umbrella. I ask them if there are any other ways that I could have possibly gotten the umbrella wet. At first they usually can't think of any but eventually someone will come up with something, such as, "the sprinklers were on." Sometimes they throw in other forms of precipitation, such as, "It might be snowing." This is great because it allows us to talk about the difference between good evidence or clues and jumping to conclusions or using what we call "bad evidence" to make the wrong inference. We talk about how the answers on the STAAR test are often tricky and if they are not very careful, they might use evidence the wrong way or draw conclusions based on "long-shot" sorts of evidence. At the end, we determine that the best explanation for the wet umbrella is that it must be raining outside. We discuss how they were able to infer that without me saying a word. We talk about how they use inferences all day long in real-life.
This leads directly into the next part of this first lesson. The only resource you really need is an interesting photo, which you can easily obtain from the internet. I give the instructions first. "We're going to look at a picture. I want you to look carefully at the picture and then, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to tell me what you see. You can only tell me what you actually see, not what you think is going on." I give the students a few minutes to study the picture and then we discuss what they see. When they accidentally make an inference--and at first this happens very frequently--I stop them and we talk about why their statements were an inference, what evidence they used to draw that conclusion and why it might be incorrect. Usually, their inferences are pretty spot on and I have to really stretch to give them an example of why they might be wrong. This is good for them, however, because it gives them an idea of what misleading evidence looks and sounds like.
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| Start with an interesting picture. What can you see? "A girl. Trees." What do you infer? "She's pretending to be a fairy." Photo courtesy of Glitter and Tulle Boutique |
After the students have listed all of the things they see, I let them explain what they think is happening. This allows them to practice making inferences. We talk about the supporting evidence that they found. We talk about other possibilities and sometimes there is a bit of debate but most of the time the students draw similar conclusions from the pictures. The kids love this activity and always (and I mean always!) beg to do it again--and then to do another one and another one.
Once my students have practiced this activity a few times, I lead them into the next activity. This one follows the same steps, except for, instead of sharing their thinking out-loud, I have them make a graphic organizer and record their thoughts in writing first and then share. This gives them the opportunity to write, which also allows them to think without being interrupted by someone else shouting out his or her ideas. You can see a picture of the graphic organizer below, but it's pretty simple. I have the students label the top of their paper "Inference" and then make two boxes, one for what they see and one for what they infer. Even though a lot of my students hate to write, they enjoy this activity almost as much as they do the first activity where they are just looking at the pictures. We've done both of these activities several times now and most of the kids are getting to be real pros at it.
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| On the left, you can see how my student recorded what was happening in the picture. On the right is her inference. |
Our next step will be to apply our inferences to texts. I will start with good, authentic literature and then transition into grade-level passages that the students can read on their own. I won't introduce written questions and answers until they are very good at both listening to texts and making inferences and then reading texts and making inferences. For higher students, you may not need to scaffold so much but for my friends, this will give them a better opportunity to solidify the skills they are being introduced to, one step at a time. Otherwise, they will never cement the process, they won't have the opportunity to learn how to think or how to pay attention to their own thoughts, and they won't understand the academic vocabulary, which is a huge factor in determining who sinks and who swims when it comes to state assessments (and life in general!)
What lessons do you have for inferencing? Please feel free to post them in the comments!
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