Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences

Use this set of comprehension task cards with your students to help them draw conclusions and make inferences when reading.

What’s an Inference?
Based on the information presented in a text or situation, readers make logical conclusions or educated guesses known as inferences. The process of making inferences involves combining background knowledge and reasoning skills with implicit information or clues provided by the text or context to draw a conclusion that is not explicitly stated. Inferences are an essential part of reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Inferences go beyond the surface-level meaning of text and require students to explore the deeper layers of a passage. To make accurate inferences, students must consider character motivations, cause-and-effect relationships, implicit details, and connections between different parts of the text. This involves reading between the lines to understand what is hinted at or implied.

For example, if a story describes a character coming home with wet hair, carrying a dripping umbrella and a raincoat, the inference might be that it was raining outside. This conclusion is drawn from the clues provided (wet hair, dripping umbrella, raincoat) without the text explicitly stating that it was raining.

 This resource includes:

Five comprehension task cards, which include a text to read and accompanying questions
An enrichment task for each card where students use their creativity to make a product related to each text
A recording worksheet for each card
An answer key for quick and easy grading