Why would you choose to focus on making connections in texts?
In social studies, students are often asked to make inferences. This involves identifying and reading a range of texts and making a conclusion based on the summary of the evidence.
Sometimes the inference is inconclusive, leaving the student uncertain of what they can claim based on the reading. This is speculation and should be investigated further or described using phrases such as “it appears” or “it seems likely”.
At other times, students need to link pieces of text information to their prior knowledge. Knowing to check any prior knowledge for accuracy is an important aspect of learning to make inferences.
Recognising the limitations of evidence is an important aspect of learning to infer in the humanities and social sciences.
What teaching is needed?
Ask students questions that require different responses, for example:
- Questions that can be answered by locating information from the text, for example, when or why something occurred. The answers are explicitly stated.
- Questions that require students to use and check their prior knowledge for accuracy.
- Questions that prompt inference require students to locate more than one piece of relevant information, combine these pieces, and think about what these mean. You may need to introduce this strategy by modelling the questions and answers. For example:
Q: What do you notice about women’s employment around 1900?
A: Teaching and nursing seemed to be more common jobs for women at that time rather than being lawyers or doctors.
Q: What evidence did you use to make that inference?”
A: In 1901, the New Zealand Women Teachers' Association was formed, and the Nurses’ Registration Act provided training for nurses that same year. 1896 was the year the first woman graduated as a doctor, and 1897 was the year of the first woman law graduate.
Q: How did you make that inference?
A: I found pieces of related evidence about employment for women from around 1900, I looked at how they could be combined and what I could reasonably claim from that evidence. There were some things that showed that a lot of women must be involved. But the fact that only the first women graduated in law and medicine in the mid-1890s suggests that not many women would have been in those professions.
What are you looking for?
Look for students increasingly using evidence from text in their answers and gathering information through inference. Notice whether students recognise that they need to check their prior knowledge.
Next steps
Continue to introduce new text types.
