Thinking strategies

Adapted from “Thinking Strategies for Student Achievement” by Denise Nessel and Joyce Graham

Thinking strategies

Facts and inferences

This strategy helps you learn to tell the difference between explicitly stated information (the facts), and information that can be inferred from available evidence (information that allows you to make your best guess).

Facts and inferences

You already do this on your own: For example, you learn to infer other people’s feelings from their facial expressions.

You learn to infer what adults are talking about by using clues from the conversation.

This is known as “putting two and two together” to arrive at an answer.

Facts and inference

Let’s try one together. Look at this sentence:

The sky darkened as gray clouds gathered overhead, and a strong wind began to blow. The people on the street opened their umbrellas.

Facts and inferences

We know from the words that the sky is getting dark, gray clouds are forming, and the wind is blowing. We also know that people have opened their umbrellas.

That’s all explicit information: the information that is directly stated.

Facts and inferences

We can combine this explicit information with our own firsthand experience, and infer that it has started to rain.

The words don’t say that it started to rain, but the evidence suggests that it has started to rain.

Facts and inferences

That it has started to rain is implied; we infer this by connecting the available evidence with what we already know.

Facts and inferences

In your composition books, make a chart that looks like this:

Facts Inferences

(explicit information) (Implied information)

dark sky, gray clouds, It started raining

wind blowing, umbrellas

Facts and inferences

Now let’s try a longer piece of text:

Many years ago Conrad and Emily Hoffman lived on a dairy farm near a lake in Iowa. They had chores on the farm just like all the other members of the Hoffman family. During some months of the year, they also attended a one-room school about two miles from their farm.

Miss Johnson, the teacher, had been at the school for more than 30 years. She had taught Conrad’s and Emily’s mother and father and many of the other farmers in the area. Everyone in the community liked Miss Johnson. The families often invited her to come to their homes for supper, and the mothers often sent their children to school with baskets of food for Miss Johnson from their own gardens.

Facts and inferences

Now, create a facts and inferences chart. Re-read the text and record on the chart the explicit information. Then generate inferences that seem reasonable.

Here’s one to get you started:

Facts and inferences

Facts Inferences

(explicit information) (Implied information)

Conrad and Emily Hoffman Conrad and Emily are

lived with their family. siblings.