Seventy percent of standardized testing assesses inferential skills. Not surprising. Human communication is based on inferential thinking. We read other people’s expressions; we infer importance from dress or uniform; we draw conclusions about sincerity from punctuation marks and emoticons; we predict economic trends from spending and investing patterns.

Reading , too, demands inferential thought. Through inference, readers make meaning of charts and graphs; through inference, reader’s consider author’s purpose and message, both which may be affected by bias implied by the author; one draws conclusions that may be imperative to understanding the most basic ideas at the sentence or paragraph level; one extends the words of the text into the possibilities of the future or the causes of the past. But how can we heighten our students’ abilities and tendencies to infer?

This presentation provides specific textual aspects that readers need attend to in order to make connections and thereby, inferences. Fun and enlightening, this is a workshop all content area teachers enjoy and go away from with an “aha” moment themselves!