How would you teach students to make inferences and cite textual evidence to support them?

• A. Model the inference process, provide explicit cue phrases, and require students to quote or reference lines from the text as evidence; use sentence stems.
• B. Guess without any basis.
• C. Have students only summarize the text.
• D. Focus solely on decoding skills.

Answer: (A)

Making inferences means reading clues from the text and using what you already know to fill in what the author implies, then backing that guess up with exact lines or details from the text. The strongest teaching approach combines modeling the reasoning process, giving students ready-made language to express their thinking, and requiring them to point to specific evidence in the text.

By modeling the inference, you show students how to notice hints, consider possible meanings, and test those ideas against what has actually been written. Providing explicit cue phrases helps students articulate their thinking in a structured way, for example using phrases like “This suggests that…,” “The author hints that…,” or “I can infer because the line says….” Using sentence stems gives them a ready framework to state their idea and then connect it to a concrete text reference. Requiring students to quote or reference lines from the text as evidence reinforces that inferences aren’t guesses; they’re interpretations grounded in text details.

Giving students practice with these steps—identify clues, formulate an inference, cite specific lines, and explain how the evidence supports the idea—builds both comprehension and critical thinking. Relying on guessing without basis, or focusing only on summarizing or decoding, misses the essential move of reading between the lines and tying interpretation to evidence from the text.