How to teach inference?
(Activities) Like all high level critical thinking skills, inference requires broad knowledge and an extensive vocabulary for students to be able to compare, contrast, apply, synthesize, deduce or infer, conclude, reason, presume, conjecture and hypothesize. Thus, BEFORE a teacher can teach inference, there has to be broad vocabulary development that is applied to comparing and contrasting ideas, to synthesize principles, and to arrive at conclusions or infer other ideas. And the vocabulary MUST be posted, organized into MEANING CATEGORIES, and the ideas compared and contrasted need to be posted, too. How can we teach inference? THROUGH QUESTIONS. The teacher needs to understand the role (h)is/er questions play in promoting the development of high level critical thinking skills, like inference. ALL QUESTIONS a teacher may ask can be rephrased differently to help students formulate their answers. In teaching high order thinking skills many times students do not know HOW TO EXPRESS THEIR
