Inference Training

Overview

This scheme focuses upon the band of children who fall within the normal range of cognitive ability, yet fail to comprehend fully what they read. The many skills needed to understand a text are broken down into manageable chunks: lexical elaboration, question generation and comprehension monitoring. Tasks are designed so that children can make links between the text and its meaning. Sessions last between 20 and 45 minutes, twice a week for four weeks

 Studies by Nicola Yuill and Jane Oakhill at the University of Sussex in the 1980s showed that less skilled readers have difficulty in making inferences from text. They argued that word recognition and decoding skills are not always adequate in developing good reading skills. The meanings of individual sentences and paragraphs have to be integrated so as to understand the main ideas of the text. See Yuill and Oakhill (1988) for an overview of this research.Later studies have highlighted the key role inference plays in reading comprehension. Cain et al. (2001) showed that less skilled comprehenders generate fewer inferences than skilled comprehenders. A longitudinal study of children between the ages of 7 and 11 by Oakhill and Cain (2011) found that the skills that predicted later reading comprehension were those that aided the construction and integrated representation of the meaning of text. Three skills, inference and integration, comprehension monitoring and the knowledge and use of story structure predicted reading development, over and above general verbal ability and vocabulary.

Evaluation Summary

Four separate Primary-level studies are evaluated here, between 1988 and 2014. These demonstrate remarkable impact on accuracy and comprehension skills. Yuill & Oakhill (1988) is of particular interest because so few tackle comprehension improvement directly. In 2009-11 data were gathered from 120 KS3 pupils in Leicester. The results showed a substantial gain in reading accuracy. Inference training for pupils with ASC also shows remarkable impact on comprehension.