What is it that makes some people be able to figure something out when others struggle with it? How can detectives scan the scene of a crime and in mere seconds, figure out largely what happened? It has to do with the thinking skill called "Inference."

Inference (from the root word, "infer"), means to be able to plug in the missing pieces so to speak to come up with a valid conclusion about something. Here's an example.

Let's say I come home and notice a police car at a neighbor's house. I don't know why the police car is there. Should I be worried? Naturally, it is a bit disconcerting to drive up to find a police car at a neighbor's home, but do I need to necessarily think the worst? Should I call her family and let them know? What should I do?

If you know your neighbor, you may know a little something about them. Perhaps they are a volunteer policeman themselves and they are just talking to a friend from the force about the next town meeting. Maybe you know that your neighbor has had a few run-ins with the law in the past (not that you noticed, right?) I've never been someone who kept up with what my neighbors are doing but I did actually see a police car at a neighbor's house once and another police car on the street close to my house when I drove up one night. I was afraid something bad had happened. I rolled down my window as I drove up and asked the police officer if everything was okay and they said , "Yes, it's under control."

A week later, I had a yard sale outside my house and a private investigator came and asked me if my boyfriend was harassing me because they got a call that someone on my street had stated that her boyfriend was harassing and threatening her. I said, "No, it wasn't me and I don't have a boyfriend," but no matter what I said, the investigator still believed it was true. He thought I was holding out because this imaginary boyfriend was in the house or nearby and I was afraid to tell him. Nope. No boyfriend! No problem!

Later, I figured out that, the reason he thought it was me was that someone reported a girl on my street who lived alone reported her boyfriend threatened her so they assumed it was me since I also lived alone at that time.

Then I put the 2 things together...the police car at her house and the investigator asking if I wanted to report a malicious boyfriend. The investigator had mistaken me for my neighbor, who also lived by herself and the police car that had been at her house that night was because she herself had reported the abuse of her boyfriend that day.

If I had known beforehand of the problems my neighbor was having, I would have been able to infer the reason the police were there and also to infer why the investigator was trying to find her, and I could have played a part in helping her.

I don't get involved in other people's problems as a rule and stay to myself. But background knowledge is essential in being able to correctly infer what is happening in any given situation.
As a rule, I am very good at inferring and even work with OSINT (open source intelligence), a citizen's intelligence agency founded by a former CIA spy (a good guy) which has as its primary goal to be able to connect with every source in the country and the world to figure out what people need to know. I did help figure out a lot about what was going on in the world the past few years and have been a part of restoring America against the Globalists and Marxist movements we see sweeping the country.

So inference is one of my strong points. But if you don't have the background information that is essential to understanding a situation, you have to rely on pure logic. I did figure out what happened with my neighbor doing just that but, had I known more, I could have helped more.

This is a long story to illustrate in my own experience what inference is. There are many other examples I could give like how I can figure out when the mail is late without seeing the mail truck, know when I have received an order with one of my online stores with no notification, and figure out what someone walking by my house is up to without even knowing who they are.

My Masters work in Forensic and Clinical Psychology doesn't hurt!

The point is: Inference is important to helping us fill in the gaps to know the whole picture. Some of us are better at this than others. But it IS a skill that can be taught and learned. Kids need to know how to infer based on what they understand about a situation, too. Maybe they figured out that a friend is sick because they didn't come over to play as they usually do. Or maybe they know their Dad is mad because they didn't mow the lawn! How can they tell? (Discuss).

Most importantly, inference is a skill that is widely used in school for writing and thinking. You have to infer in science, in math, in language classes, in art, and even in social situations.

When it comes to writing, inference is a very important thinking skill that helps draw conclusions about something based on what we see, observe, hear, or know. Building background knowledge is a big part of this but we also use all of our senses to bring it all together. True logic really only makes sense when we have certain facts in mind as a frame of reference to the situation. This is why a lot of people on TV or other media today sound so confused. "This doesn't make sense to me," they say. But if they knew the how plan and the background information surrounding the situation in the world right now, it would all make sense!

Helping kids grasp the skill of inference (knowing without evidence) is important, but it is equally important to remind them that inference does not equate to truth every time. Inferences can be wrong and often are, even among the smartest detectives and others who rely on this "dog sense" to do their jobs!

Once you have a theory or infer something, now, you need to set out to prove it. So, like a detective, you need to gather evidence or supporting statements that show your inference is likely correct.

When we write using the inference thinking skill, we use EXPOSITORY text and sometimes NARRATIVE text, just as we do with analysis and comparison. But we are more focused on making statements in the topic sentence that will be supported by the sentences that follow that prove our statement is likely correct.

It is important to note that, while inference can often be proven with facts and evidence, sometimes it cannot. In these cases, we either didn't know where to find the right evidence or we are dealing with an opinion. In such cases, the writing should be such that we adequately support our views, even if they are more a theory than a fact.

Practice makes perfect.

Use this information and the 1-minute video as a jumping off place as you teach INFERENCE to your child. Try coming up with a mystery and seeing if your child can solve it.
Also, watch the YouTube video by Scholastic that talks about how we use inferences every day and in reading. It's important for kids to know that we use many of the skills in our everyday life, not just when we are writing a paragraph for English class!
These text-to-text, text-to-world, and other examples of inference often appear in different forms on state Benchmark and writing exams.
Make a game out of it if you can.
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