Inferring: Encouraging Students to develop an Interpretation

The Situation

You want your students to develop opinions about characters, conflict and setting.

The Solution

Inferring is the process of concluding from evidence. When we read a story, we infer meaning from the the ideas conveyed through character and conflict.

Checkout this video for additional explanations.

There are a number of ways to teach inference, but it comes down to the way that you frame your questions. Here are number of question stems to use after your students have read a text.

Remember to encourage students to use evidence to support their ideas.

Question Stems

• Why do you think…?
• What would happen if…?
• What do you predict?
• What do you think that behavior means?
• Can you show me a place where you had to assume something that the author didn’t come right out and tell you?
• What character traits are the characters showing right now?  Find text evidence to back that up.