A student asked us this week how to make his inferences better.
He had been told, repeatedly and by several people, that his answers needed to be more perceptive. Nobody had been able to tell him what to actually do on Monday morning to become more perceptive by Friday, which is the problem with that word.
We think the honest answer is not the one most students expect, and it is more encouraging than it first sounds.
What an inference actually is
An inference is a conclusion you reach that the text does not state directly.
The text says a woman counts her coins twice before entering a shop. Nobody writes “she was poor and anxious about money”. You work it out. That working out is the inference, and in GCSE English it is where most of the marks live.
Here is the part that changes everything about how you improve it.
You cannot draw a conclusion out of a text using a method. The conclusion has to come from somewhere, and 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, and the one who knows more will see more in it. Not because they are cleverer. Because they have more to think with.
This is why “be more perceptive” cannot be followed. It describes the result, not the cause.
The research is unusually direct about this
There is a study that tests almost exactly this question.
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. There was also a comparison group 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]
Read that second half again. The students taught procedures for understanding texts were sometimes beaten by the students who were taught nothing special at all.
The researchers also found that the content students talked more about the text and gave longer answers.[1] They had more to say, because they had spent their time on meaning rather than on method.
We should be careful here, and we would rather say so than oversell it. That study was done with ten-year-olds in one American school district, not with GCSE students, and it does not prove that strategies are useless. What it does show is that the thing which looks like a shortcut — teach the procedure, get the perceptiveness — did not behave like one.
So if procedures are not the lever, what is? 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 you will hear: a way of describing something without using like or as.
That is true. It is also almost useless, because it tells you only how to tell a metaphor apart from a simile. It tells you nothing about what a metaphor is for, so 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.
That version does real work. It tells you what to look for, and it tells you what to do once you have found it, because it points 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 not a shadow, and it is not an actor. 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? And the answer is available — that a life is brief, that it is insubstantial, 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.
None of that is a private theory of ours. It 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. Knowing what literature is actually about
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. It is about human conflicts and human problems. The techniques are how writers do that. They are not 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 look for techniques. A student who knows the text is an argument about people will ask what the writer is saying about people, which is the question the top bands of every mark scheme are actually rewarding.
3. Connecting one text to another
In the lesson that produced this article 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 — the same period, and 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, who was believed. None of that is in the extract, and all of it makes the extract easier to read.
This is called transfer, and researchers 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 deliberately: whenever you meet a new text, ask which text you already know sits closest to it, and in what way.
4. Volume, over months
The last one is the least exciting and it does the most work. Read a lot. Write a lot. Read about the period your text comes from, and about the writer’s own life. Read model answers and notice what the strong ones do that yours does not.
None of that produces a visible improvement in a fortnight, which is why students abandon it. It is also the only one of the four that keeps paying after the exam.
What we are not saying
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 the structure is not where perceptiveness comes from, and that a student who feels stuck at “sound but not perceptive” has almost always hit a knowledge ceiling rather than a technique ceiling. More procedures will not move them. More understanding will.
And there is no fast version. Building knowledge takes months, and anybody offering a weekend course in perceptiveness is selling something.
Back to the student’s question
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.
Perceptiveness is not a technique that some students have and others lack. It is what deep familiarity looks like from the outside.
