Deeper inferences come from deeper knowledge

A student asked us recently how to make his inferences better.

Several different people had told him, again and again, that his answers needed to be more perceptive. Not one of them had been able to tell him what to do on Monday morning to become more perceptive by Friday.

Suppose he had asked you instead, across the kitchen table. What would you tell him to do on Monday? The natural answer is a method, a set of steps he could follow while he reads. We think the honest answer is different, and more encouraging than it first sounds.

Inferences come from what you know

An inference is a conclusion you reach that the text does not state directly.

Try one now. The text says a woman counts her coins twice before she goes into a shop. What do you conclude about her? Nobody writes “she was poor and anxious about money”, yet you work it out, and that working out is the inference. In GCSE English, inference is where most of the marks are.

Now ask where your conclusion came from. You did not follow a procedure to reach it. No method alone can draw a conclusion out of a text, because a conclusion has to come from somewhere. It comes from what you already know: about people, about how stories work, about the period the text was written in, about what writers do and why.

Two students can read the same paragraph with the same reading ability. The one who knows more will see more in it, not because that student is cleverer but because they have more to think with. So the advice to “be more perceptive” could never be followed: it names the result and says nothing about the cause.

In one study, method lost to meaning

The obvious way to make a student more perceptive is to teach a procedure for reading. One study tested almost exactly that idea.

Researchers ran a two-year classroom experiment comparing two ways of teaching comprehension. One group got content instruction, meaning open questions about what the text actually meant. The other got strategies instruction, meaning they were taught specific procedures for approaching a text as they read it. A comparison group was taught in the ordinary way.

The result: “for narrative recall and expository learning probes, Content students outperformed Strategies students, and occasionally, the Basal control students outperformed Strategies students.”^[1]

In plainer words, the students who were taught procedures for understanding texts were sometimes beaten by the students who had been taught nothing special at all.

The researchers also found that the content students talked more about the text and gave longer answers.^[1] We think they had more to say because they had spent their time on meaning rather than on method.

That study has limits. It was done with ten-year-olds in one American school district, not with GCSE students. Nor does it prove that strategies are useless. What it does show is that the apparent shortcut, teaching the procedure in order to get the perceptiveness, did not behave like one.

So if procedures are not what makes the difference, what does? We would point to four things, and a student can start all four this week.

1. Definitions that open a text up, rather than shut it down

Ask most students what a metaphor is, and in our experience you will hear the same answer: a way of describing something without using like or as.

That definition is true and almost useless. It tells you how to tell a metaphor from a simile, and nothing about what a metaphor is for. A student armed with it can spot one and then has nothing to say about it.

Here is a better definition: a metaphor describes something in a way that is not literally true, in order to explain an idea.

A definition like that does real work, because it tells you both what to look for and what to do once you have found it, by pointing you at the idea being carried.

Take Macbeth, near the end of the play, on hearing that his wife is dead:

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.”

A life is neither a shadow nor an actor, so neither statement is literally true. Under the weak definition, a student notes “metaphor” and moves on. Under the better one, the question becomes: what idea is being explained? The answer is there to be found: that a life is brief, that it has no substance, and that it is performed rather than truly lived. Macbeth has spent the play seizing a crown, and at the end he describes existence as a man acting a part badly for a short time.

That is an inference, and it came out of a definition rather than out of a technique.

The idea is close to the argument of a well-known book on metaphor, which holds that metaphor is a way of understanding one thing in terms of another, rather than a decoration added to writing afterwards.^[2]

Do this with every term you have been taught. If your definition of a technique does not tell you what the technique is for, it will never produce an inference.

2. Literature is about people, not techniques

A great many students believe that literature is writing with techniques in it, and that studying it means finding the techniques.

We would define it differently. Literature is a creative exploration of what it means to be a human being, carried out through fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama, and it deals with human conflicts and human problems. The techniques are how writers do that, rather than the point of it.

This matters for inference more than almost anything else on the list. A student who thinks a text is a container for techniques will go looking for techniques. A student who knows the text is an argument about people will ask what the writer is saying about people. The top bands of every mark scheme are actually rewarding that question.

3. One text helps you read another

In one recent lesson we were working on an exam extract about a young woman in the early 1900s who has neither money nor power, and who suffers for it.

Rather than analysing it in isolation, we connected it to An Inspector Calls, which comes from the same period and deals with the same subject of wealth, status and who is made to pay for other people’s comfort. The Inspector’s warning is the plainest statement of it in the whole set of GCSE texts:

“We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.”

A student who has studied that play already knows a great deal about the world the exam extract comes from. They know what a young working woman’s position was, what respectability meant and who was believed. None of that is in the extract, yet all of it makes the extract easier to read.

Researchers call this transfer, and those who study it have shown that it does not happen automatically. It has to be looked for and taught deliberately.^[3] So look for it on purpose: whenever you meet a new text, ask which text you already know sits closest to it, and in what way.

4. Plenty of reading and writing, over months

The last of the four is the least exciting, but it does the most work. Read a lot and write a lot. Read about the period your text comes from and about the writer’s own life, and read model answers to notice what the strong ones do that yours does not.

None of that produces a visible improvement in a fortnight, so students abandon it. Yet it is the only one of the four that keeps helping after the exam.

Strategies still have a place

We are not saying that reading strategies have no value, or that a student should stop being taught how to approach an unseen text. Some structure helps, especially at the start.

We are saying that perceptiveness does not come from the structure. A student who feels stuck at “sound but not perceptive” has almost always reached the limit of what they know rather than the limit of their technique, so more procedures will not move them on, but more understanding will.

Nor is there a fast version. Building knowledge takes months, and anybody offering a weekend course in perceptiveness is promising more than a weekend can deliver.

Back to Monday morning

So the answer we gave him was this.

Stop trying to have better ideas about the text. Go and learn more about the text, the period, the writer, and the human situation the writer is describing, and then have ordinary ideas about all of that. They will be better ideas, because they will have more behind them.

What those people had been calling perceptiveness is what deep familiarity with a text looks like from the outside. Familiarity is something he can start building on Monday morning.

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