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Focused Feedback for Inference in Expository Text
Author(s) -
Thornley Christina,
Selbie Joanne,
McDonald Trevor
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
the reading teacher
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.642
H-Index - 50
eISSN - 1936-2714
pISSN - 0034-0561
DOI - 10.1598/rt.64.5.7
Subject(s) - task (project management) , comprehension , inference , psychology , mathematics education , literal (mathematical logic) , reading comprehension , teaching method , pedagogy , reading (process) , computer science , linguistics , artificial intelligence , philosophy , management , algorithm , economics , programming language
This Teaching Tips article describes a classroom‐based research project conducted between a teacher and a researcher. The topic arose from the teacher's concern about the inaccuracies and misconceptions exhibited by many of her third‐grade students as they fluently decoded unfamiliar expository texts. The teacher researched her practice and the students' learning as she implemented an approach called “focused feedback,” to support their acquisition of retelling, with evidence and inference as comprehension strategies. The article describes how the research project informed the teaching. It explains the use of observations, research literature, a student survey, and a teacher designed assessment task to build the teacher's knowledge and to refine her instruction. It illustrates how the students' abilities to identify literal information from which they then made inferences could increase their knowledge of an unfamiliar topic.