Stephany Anderson, Ed.D.

If you teach a content-area text, whether it be a novel, a primary source, or a lab report, you have probably watched a student who reads fluently give an answer that is reasonable, personal, and wrong. The student is reading but is also inferring from the wrong knowledge base: their own life experience instead of the discipline’s. This post is about that gap.

I experienced that gap as a reading interventionist working one-on-one with a ninth-grade student assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird. The text assumes a knowledge base she did not yet have. Reading it with her required me to scaffold two kinds of disciplinary reading: historical (the social codes, hierarchies, and economic conditions of 1930s Alabama that the novel doesn’t pause to explain) and literary (how to read a narrator’s perspective, a character’s choice as a product of setting, a scene as a test of theme). She could read the text, but was being asked to do disciplinary work that no one had taught her to do.

All of us who teach complex texts have to keep that distinction in mind.  In literary study, inference is supplying context that is not stated because it was common knowledge at the time the text was written. In history, it is weighing a source against other sources. In science, it is testing a claim against the evidence. The underlying move is the same across disciplines: recognize what the reader brings, identify what the text assumes, and build the bridge. What differs is the knowledge and the habits of mind each discipline demands. The strategies below grew out of specific points where my student struggled, so I had to teach a disciplinary reading move to address the gap.

1 · Applying historical context to character motives

My student could form opinions about a character’s motives. For instance, she could imagine several reasons why Mayella Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird might lie. But she did not understand the historical expectations and power structures that shaped those choices: the racial hierarchy of 1930s Maycomb, the way a poor white woman’s testimony carried a very different weight than a Black man’s, or why honesty could be costly in Mayella’s position. Without that contextual knowledge, her inference was reasonable from her own experience but incomplete within the world of the text. She was applying a personal theory of motive to a historical situation that demanded a disciplinary one.

How QAR addressed it

I planned Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) questions aligned to our daily reading, asked them orally, and used open-ended follow-ups to help her elaborate and support her ideas with both textual evidence and background knowledge (Vaughn et al., 2022). QAR sorts questions into categories:

• Right There: The answer appears explicitly in the text.
• Think and Search: The reader combines information found in different parts of the text.
• Author and Me: The reader integrates textual evidence with prior knowledge to develop an interpretation.

“Author and Me” questions were the most difficult because they required her to do what she was missing: link the author’s craft and perspective to the social and historical knowledge the text does not state directly. Talking through these questions allowed us to pinpoint what she understood, identify which background knowledge was missing, and return to the text with a clearer understanding.

2 · She guessed instead of identifying what she didn’t know

She often wanted to guess and move on rather than acknowledge a gap in understanding, which meant the gap stayed invisible, and neither her teacher nor I knew she was confused until she failed an assignment or test.

How we addressed it

A central part of the QAR work was teaching her to say, “I don’t know yet.” We practiced treating uncertainty as a signal to look for additional evidence or background knowledge rather than as something to hide. Naming a gap is itself a disciplinary habit. Historians, scientists, and literary scholars all pause when they are not certain what the evidence supports.

3 · She made reasonable-but-incomplete assumptions I couldn’t see

A quicker strategy for surfacing inference difficulties was a text-rendering activity (National School Reform Faculty, n.d.). After reading a section, I asked her to identify one word, one phrase, and one sentence — each representing information she considered especially important, none drawn from the same sentence — and then to explain why she had chosen each one. For a literary text, the choice of a single word often exposes a reader’s working theory of theme, character, or tone.

How text rendering addressed it

Her explanations often revealed assumptions that a traditional comprehension question would not have uncovered, which we could then confirm, expand on, or rethink in light of the text. For example, she understood that the Cunninghams lacked money and relied partly on barter, but not how the family was tied to its land through entailment or why the land failed to generate profit during the Great Depression. Those gaps shaped her reading of the scene in which Scout’s personal recognition of Walter Cunningham’s father helps disperse the lynch mob; she needed support to see how addressing one person individually interrupted the group’s momentum and restored a shared humanity. The activity helped us identify the misunderstanding during instruction rather than after she failed an assessment.

4 · The text itself created barriers 

Some difficulties arose from the text: syntax that overloaded her working memory, organizational patterns that were hard to follow, narrative perspectives that obscured meaning, and vocabulary or background knowledge that needed to be taught up front. These are the features that make a complex literary text complex and the ones a struggling reader is most likely to encounter without support.

How AI-supported planning addressed it

Before teaching a text, I asked an AI platform to identify features that might be difficult for a ninth-grade student who struggles with reading. I provided the title and chapter for a novel or pasted the assigned passage for shorter texts. The analysis sometimes flagged:

• Sentence structures that could overload working memory
• Organizational patterns that might be difficult to follow
• Narrative perspectives that might obscure meaning
• Vocabulary and background knowledge that need to be taught
• Places where definitions or embedded comments could support comprehension (Lupo et al., 2024)

AI did not replace my knowledge of the student or make instructional decisions for me. It helped me anticipate possible barriers and consider scaffolds before she encountered them. For example, it identified Scout’s point of view as being potentially challenging for a student struggling with inference, since Scout was a child interpreting adult events. The reader cannot take Scout’s reading of the events at face value but must identify the mature scene being described. 

Note that teachers should review AI-generated suggestions carefully, particularly when an analysis involves a text’s narrator, historical context, or literary interpretation; the most useful results come when AI functions as a planning partner whose recommendations are checked against the actual text, instructional goals, and students’ needs.

5 · Adapting these strategies to a larger class

I used these strategies in one-on-one interventions, but each can be adapted for partners or small groups in a larger classroom (Hammond, 2020).

How to adapt them

After carefully grouping students, the teacher’s role becomes circulating and listening closely for evidence of how students are constructing meaning. When a group’s reasoning becomes unclear, the teacher steps in with a guiding question rather than supplying the answer and records key ideas heard on the whiteboard. During the debrief, instead of having each group repeat its full response, the teacher invites students to review the class-generated list and add only ideas not yet captured. Students then discuss whether they agree or disagree and return to the text to resolve differences. This makes inference a shared process of inquiry: students learn not to accept interpretations simply because they sound plausible, but to test them against textual evidence, historical context, and alternative perspectives.

Making Invisible Thinking Visible

Students who struggle with inference often produce an incorrect answer without revealing the thinking behind it. If teachers only see the final response, they may not know whether the student missed an important detail, lacked necessary background knowledge, misunderstood the author’s perspective, or relied too heavily on personal experience.

QAR questions, text rendering, and carefully reviewed AI-supported planning expose hidden points of difficulty and allow teachers to intervene before a misunderstanding leads to a poor test score. In literary study, inference develops when students have repeated opportunities to explain their reasoning, recognize gaps in their knowledge, gather textual and contextual evidence, and revise their interpretations. Teaching students to pause and say, “I don’t know yet,” may be one of the most valuable steps in that process. It transforms uncertainty from something to hide into an opportunity to think more deeply.

References

Hammond, Z. (2020). The power of protocols for equity. Educational Leadership, 77(7).

Lupo, S. M., Reynolds, D., & Hardigree, C. (2024). Tackling tough texts: A research-based guide to 

scaffolding learning in grades 6–12. Guilford Press.

National School Reform Faculty. (n.d.). Text rendering experience. Massachusetts Department of 

Elementary and Secondary Education. https://www.mass.gov/doc/text-rendering-protocol/download

Vaughn, S., Gersten, R., Dimino, J., Taylor, M. J., Newman-Gonchar, R., Krowka, S., Kieffer, M. J., 

McKeown, M., Reed, D., Sanchez, M., St. Martin, K., Wexler, J., Morgan, S., Yañez, A., & Jayanthi, 

M. (2022). Providing reading interventions for students in grades 4–9 (WWC 2022007). National 

Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. 

Department of Education.

Dr. Stephany Anderson is a wife, mother, and grandmother who enjoys rural life in Northwest Wyoming while serving as an instructor for Grand Canyon University and the University of Wyoming. She is a dedicated educator committed to literacy and her students, who began her teaching career in 1999, following ten years of work with at-risk youth. Over nearly three decades in education, she has taught high school Language Arts, Social Studies, and Reading Intervention; coached drama, speech, and debate; and mentored students in Model UN, History Day, and Junior History. She served as her district’s secondary literacy specialist and instructional coach in her final years in public education while contributing to state-level standards reviews, district-wide literacy initiatives, and mentoring the next generation of educators through the Wyoming Teacher Mentor Corp.

Today, Stephany enjoys networking across districts to provide evidence-based literacy work that is collaborative, locally led, and lasting. She holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and a 7-12 Literacy Certification from the University of Wyoming. A National Board Certified Teacher, she has earned several accolades, including the Arch Coal Teaching Award (2012), a Fulbright TGC Fellowship (2014), and Wyoming History Teacher of the Year (2021).