Making Inferences Reading Comprehension Strategy

In a standard classroom, we often tell students to "read between the lines," but for a neurodiverse learner, those lines can feel like a solid, impenetrable wall. If the information isn't stated explicitly, it simply doesn't exist to them yet.

As a mentor, I’ve learned that our role isn’t to ask our students to be "detectives" in the abstract. Instead, we have to turn the mystery into a mechanical process. We have to show them that an inference isn't a guess—it’s a calculation. In my classroom, we’ve found that the only way to make this abstract thinking concrete is to provide a visual, repeatable formula that they can rely on every time the text gets quiet.

The Anatomy of an Inference

For many of our students with IEPs, the barrier to inferencing is often a struggle with working memory or social cues. They might see a detail in a story but fail to connect it to their own life experiences. To bridge this gap, I recently introduced the Inferencing Strategy Toolkit during our 50-minute English block.

I’ve found that students don’t need more "practice" at guessing; they need a thinking tool that helps them combine two distinct ingredients. We use a simple task-analysis approach: What does the book say? What do I already know? When we put those together, what is the "secret" the author is telling us? By breaking it down this way, we remove the anxiety of being "wrong" and replace it with the confidence of following a sequence.

Observations from the "We Do" Phase

During our Whole Group Instruction, I watched a shift in how my students approached a short text about a workplace scenario. We were reading about a character who arrived at their desk, saw a "Final Notice" envelope, and put their head in their hands.

In the past, my students might have said, "He is tired" or "He is sleeping." But this time, they looked toward our Inferencing Strategy anchor chart. One student, who usually waits for significant prompting, pointed to the "Text Clues" section and then at the words "Final Notice." Then, they tapped their head to signify their background knowledge. They said, "A notice is a bill. He doesn't have the money."

What surprised me wasn't just that they got the answer "right," but the way they defended it. They weren't looking at me for a nod of approval; they were looking at the evidence they had gathered. The independence that emerged was quiet but profound. They were finally using what they already knew to unlock what the author hadn't directly said.

Building Confidence Through Visual Scaffolds

For our ELL and Tier 3 learners, the "productive struggle" of reading often ends in shutdown because the steps are too invisible. By providing visual supports and step-by-step task analysis, we make the invisible, visible.

During the Partner Work phase of our lesson, I overheard a conversation that stayed with me. One student was trying to explain to another why a character was angry. They used the sentence starters from our toolkit: "The text says his fists are clenched, and I know when people do that they are mad, so I infer he is angry." They were teaching each other the "math" of reading.

This level of organization changed the engagement in the room. When the students realized that they had a repeatable process, they stopped avoiding the harder passages. Their confidence grew because they had a safety net—a thinking framework that worked for a biography of James Joyce just as well as it worked for a Digital Literacy manual on internet safety.

Why Inferences Matter for the Workforce

In our setting, we are always looking toward the horizon. Preparing these students for the workforce means teaching them to navigate a world that is full of "implicit" information. A supervisor’s tone, a subtle safety warning, or the social cues of a breakroom all require the ability to infer.

Teachers love this Making Inferences Reading Comprehension strategy because it turns a "hard" skill into a low-prep, high-impact routine. It supports struggling readers by making abstract thinking concrete and encourages evidence-based responses. When students learn how to infer, they don’t just read the words on the page—they start to understand the world around them.

As you mentor your students through their reading blocks this week, watch for that moment where they stop looking at you for the answer and start looking at their own background knowledge. It is the moment they realize they already have half of the answer inside them.

When you move from asking "What do you think is happening?" to asking "What is the evidence plus your experience?", how does the logical quality of your students' conclusions improve during independent work?