Podcast Transcript
When you read, many times you must figure out things on your own. The author doesn’t always tell you everything. For example, you might read these sentences: “The moon cast an eerie glow in Jake’s room. Suddenly, he saw a shadow by the window. Jake sat up in bed, frozen with fear.” From what the author has written, you can tell that it is probably night-time, because the moon is out, and Jake is in bed. Questions about drawing conclusions often contain the key words you can tell or probably.
In the previous episode, we focused on the seventh reading strategy – Finding Word Meaning in Context.
This episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast is about Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences, which is one of the main reading strategies that underpins CARS & STARS Online.
But what are reading strategies, and why should you know about them?
Learning to read can be a difficult task, but teaching someone to read can be another thing entirely. Learning to decode letters and sound out words are one thing, but neither skill really assists in the most important aspect of reading – that of comprehending what one reads, of being able to understand what something is saying rather than just being able to read it as text.
Understanding text in this way has often been something students have been expected to just pick up on their own – or something that will develop as the ability to decode the text on a literal level does. One reason why this might be the case is because understanding is such a nebulous concept – we can tell students can read something if they can read it to us, but we can only really determine whether they understand it fully with some much more in-depth work.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension.
The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike.
The twelve reading strategies progress from simpler, lower-order thinking skills such as Finding the Main Idea and Recalling Facts and Details to more complex, higher-order concepts such as Identifying Author’s Purpose and Summarising. Initial questions determine students’ mastery of the text at a literal level, while later questions build on this understanding to get to the heart of their conceptual understanding. In this way, in every reading passage across every reading level, students are being asked to perform the same essential tasks – with their difficulty and complexity increasing as the student progresses through the reading levels.
These research-proven strategies, taken together, offer a complete recipe for increased student awareness of textual features and concepts, and provide a direct and understandable pathway to improving reading comprehension for each and every student.
And now, onto our main strategy for this episode: Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences!
Drawing conclusions from texts read and being able to make inferences from information presented in a passage is a crucial skill in developing advanced reading comprehension.
Both of these skills require a student reader to go beyond what is simply presented in a passage and obliges them to critically and imaginatively engage with stories to not just be able to relate how something happened, but to get at the why of events and the motivations behind them.
Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences is one of the twelve reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online because harnessing this skill is a crucial step in a student moving to a more developed level of reading comprehension.
A student who is able to master this strategy will be able to habitually look behind a text to think critically about the information presented within it, not just relying on what is directly stated in the story but being able to think deeper about why things have happened the way they did and why.
Questions about this strategy in the CARS & STARS Online program will regularly ask students to expound on the motivations behind an action or event that go unexplained explicitly in the text – asking students why they think someone did something – or asking students to infer based on what is most likely or probable, rather than what is definite.
Questions about Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences move students from a direct, lower-order level of thinking about texts read to a more indirect, higher-order level of thinking, where meaning is derived not simply from what is explicitly stated but from critically and imaginatively engaging with text to think about the story and events beyond those presented.
Here are some tips for using the strategy of Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences with any text.
Think about the details in a reading passage.
Think about what you know from your own life.
Use the detail clues and what you already know to draw a conclusion or make an inference about something not directly stated in the passage.
Now that we’ve talked about what this strategy is and how it works, let’s have a go at using Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences in a passage ourselves: and answering questions the way students do in CARS & STARS Online!
First, I’ll read the text.
In 1964, the surgeon general of the United States issued an important report. It suggested that cigarette smoking caused cancer. Since then, there have been protests against smoking around the world.
The antismoking movement has been around a lot longer than this, though. Centuries earlier, people were speaking out against tobacco.
Back in the fifteenth century, one of Columbus’s sailors was sent to jail for smoking tobacco. One Russian ruler had smokers whipped. A Chinese emperor said that people caught bringing tobacco into China would have their head chopped off. King James I of England called smoking the “precious stink”. He kept raising taxes on tobacco. He hoped the high price would prevent people from purchasing it.
Today, taxes add a lot to the price of each package of cigarettes sold in Great Britain. Even so, there are an estimated 10 to 12 million adult smokers in Great Britain. There are about 350 million smokers in China. In the United States, close to 44 million adults still smoke. Here in Australia about 16% of men and about 13% of women still smoked as of 2013.
You can figure out that
early protests were successful in stopping tobacco use.
high taxes keep people in Great Britain from smoking.
there are more smokers in the United States than in China.
or: knowledge about its dangers has not stopped people from smoking.
The correct answer here is: knowledge about its dangers has not stopped people from smoking.
This answer is correct because details explain that the dangers of smoking have been known for years. The article also explains that millions of people are still smoking. You can figure out from these details that the knowledge about its dangers has not stopped people from smoking.
There is enough information in the article to conclude that
as long as cigarettes are available, some people will probably continue to smoke.
smoking will become illegal one day soon.
the antismoking movement has not been effective in teaching people about the dangers of smoking.
or: each day, millions of adults try smoking for the first time.
The correct answer here is: as long as cigarettes are available, some people will probably continue to smoke.
This answer is correct because details in the article describe the many things done to prevent people from smoking. Details also explain that there are millions of smokers today. These details lead you to conclude that people will continue to smoke cigarettes if they are available.
Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences is featured in levels A to H of CARS & STARS Online.
It’s one of the simplest and oldest ways of keeping track of important ideas and details while reading. For as long as books have existed, readers have highlighted, underlined and scribbled things they wanted to remember in their pages – even if they weren’t meant to!
Annotating text in this way helps build three key reading skills. When annotating a text, the reader:
Formulates questions in response to what they are reading
Analyses and interprets elements of poetry or prose
Draws conclusions and makes inferences based on explicit and implicit meaning.
Showing struggling readers how to annotate text gives them useful tools to be able to interact with text and find small, immediate successes. The more students practise effective reading strategies, the more natural and like second nature they will become.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program based around the repeated application of twelve core reading strategies to make students better readers who can analyse and interpret any text at a high level of understanding. The multi-level program is designed to be entirely paper-free, with all student answers being entered directly into the software, and results being instantly recorded and corrected automatically, requiring no teacher marking.
With CARS & STARS Online, students can make annotations across the whole program as a matter of course. Throughout every reading passage, students have the option to “mark up” text. This can involve highlighting words, sentences or whole passages in a choice of several colours, the ability to add notes to this text, or a combination of both. Student annotations are saved so that students can come back to them later for any reason.
Annotation is important to readers of all levels, and as such it’s a vital part of CARS & STARS Online that’s available across every level of the program – simple, easy to use and seamless.
What’s more, these textual additions can be removed (or added to) when not relevant anymore or when they’ve been acted upon, leaving no trace and the text as good as new. Now that’s something you can’t do with a printed book!
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
If you have missed out our previous episode, please click here. The next episode will be focused on the ninth reading strategy – Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion.
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See you in the next episode, and thanks for listening!
