Exploring the teaching of inference skills

The purpose of this capstone is to describe an action research project in which a fourth grade teacher wanted to improve her reading instruction, particularly the reading skill of inference. Reading specialists, such as Harvey and Goudvis (2000), suggest explicit instruction is a successful method for the teaching of reading strategies. The teacher used four activities to explicitly teach the reading skill of inference to determine which may make a difference in students\u27 ability to make inferences. The students involved in this study were fifteen fourth grade students who were reading between a third and fourth grade reading level. Two of the students were English language learners. Performance on daily work showed an increase in students\u27 ability to make inferences while reading. Standardized test scores did not show the same results