Inference Skills Research Articles

English

Critical reading is an important ability to acquire particularly among college or university students. This study investigated the level of critical reading skills among Malaysian ESL learners at the tertiary level. The motivation for conducting the study is due to the increasing number of claims by employers and educators that most graduates lack the ability to read and think critically. Among the required reading and thinking abilities necessary to read a text critically are the analytical and inference skills. Specifically, this study examined the ESL learners’ analytical and inference skills when they read two expository texts. A self-developed critical reading comprehension test (CRCT) was used to measure their analytical skills in identifying the writer’s purpose and the main ideas in the text. The findings indicated that the students lacked the required critical skills, in particular, when they are required to identify the writer’s purpose and the main idea in the text which support the observation and experience of many Malaysian educators and researchers. This has direct implications on reading development in Malaysia. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2014-2002-04 Key words: critical reading; critical thinking; higher-order reading comprehension; analytical and inferential skills; Malaysian ESL tertiary level learners

The Relationship between EFL Teachers’ Critical Thinking Skills and Vocabulary Learning Strategy Instruction across Gender

The purpose of this study was investigating the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ critical thinking skills and teaching vocabulary-learning strategies to their students. Additionally, it explored the difference of the strength of correlation between critical thinking skills and vocabulary learning strategy instruction across gender. California Critical Thinking Test- form B and Yu-Ling’s inventory of teaching vocabulary-learning strategies were administered to 90 Iranian EFL teachers. The results showed that strategy instruction significantly and inversely correlated with analysis (r=-.27), inference (r=-.22), and inductive reasoning (r=-.3) skills, while the correlation was not significant considering evaluation (r=-.11) and deductive reasoning (r=-.089) skills. Moreover, the difference between correlation of vocabulary learning strategy instruction and inference skill was statistically significant when male and female participants were compared (Z obs =2.24).

Effect of Preschool Working Memory, Language, and Narrative Abilities on Inferential Comprehension at School-Age in Children with Spina Bifida Myelomeningocele and Typically Developing Children

Children with spina bifida myelomeningocele (SBM) are more likely to display a pattern of good-decoding/poor comprehension than their neurologically intact peers. The goals of the current study were to (1) examine the cognitive origins of one of the component skills of comprehension, bridging inferences, from a developmental perspective and (2) to test the effects of those relations on reading comprehension achievement. Data from a sample of children with SBM and a control group (n = 78) who participated in a longitudinal study were taken from age 36-month and 9.5-year time points. A multiple mediation model provided evidence that three preschool cognitive abilities (working memory/inhibitory control, oral comprehension, narrative recall), could partially explain the relation between group and bridging inference skill. A second mediation model supported that each of the 36-month abilities had an indirect effect on reading comprehension through bridging inference skill. Findings contribute to an understanding of both typical and atypical comprehension development, blending theories from the developmental, cognitive, and neuropsychological literature.

The Role of Inference Making and Other Language Skills in the Development of Narrative Listening Comprehension in 4–6‐Year‐Old Children

AbstractIn this two‐year longitudinal study, we sought to examine the developmental relationships among early narrative listening comprehension and language skills (i.e., vocabulary knowledge, sentence memory, and phonological awareness) and the roles of these factors in predicting narrative listening comprehension at the age of 6 years. We also sought to examine the role of inference‐making skills as longitudinal and concurrent predictors of other language skills and listening comprehension from the age of 4 to 6 years. One hundred thirty Finnish‐speaking children participated in the study. A theoretical model of the developmental relationships among the variables was proposed and the associations were analyzed by means of path analysis. Results showed that inference skills, assessed through picture‐book viewing, made a significant and unique contribution to variation in later narrative listening comprehension. Inference skills also played an indirect role in narrative listening comprehension by making a significant contribution to vocabulary knowledge even after controlling for earlier vocabulary knowledge and sentence memory. Although vocabulary knowledge and sentence memory were related to concurrent narrative listening comprehension, they did not predict later listening comprehension over and above the autoregressor. The results are discussed in terms of the predictive validity and diagnostic sensitivity of inference skills assessments in listening comprehension. Implications for research and theory are also discussed.

A Preliminary Investigation into Critical Thinking Skills of Urban High School Students: Role of an IT/STEM Program

th , 2012; revised March 18 th , 2012; accepted March 31 st , 2012 This paper reports the development of critical thinking of urban high school students in an IT/STEM program-using information technology (IT) within the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The study used a quasi-experimental time-series design, involving 47 initial participants in an eighteen-month intervention period. Data were collected from the Test of Everyday Reasoning (TER), which provides an overall score on critical thinking skill (CTS) and five sub-scale scores (analysis, inference, evaluation, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning). Findings indicate that based on a mean score of 15.77, the average participant scored between the 16th and 19th percentiles at the beginning of the program compared to an aggregated national sample. Participants who completed the program and responded to all three time-series TER tests (14) significantly improved their critical thinking skills throughout the program. Program completers’ overall post-program CTS test score was more homogeneous than the pre-program scores with a 20.07 mean score. In addition, data showed significant improvement in inductive reasoning skills of the program participants during the first nine months with continuing improvement in the second nine months. In contrast, data presented improved inference skills during the first nine months with significant gains during the second half of the program. The study estimates the relative effects of IT/STEM experiences with technology-enhanced, inquiry and design-based collaborative learning strategies on CTS of urban high school students.

La comprensión y la inferencia en el estudio de hipertextos con el apoyo de un agente generador de preguntas

<p>Este documento es una síntesis del proyecto “Agentes de software generadores de preguntas y el desarrollo de la competencia cognitiva de hacer inferencias: la comprensión y la inferencia en diferentes niveles de profundidad en ambientes hipermediales”, desarrollado por el Grupo tecnice de la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional de Colombia.</p><p>La investigación analiza el efecto del uso de un agente de software generador de preguntas durante la etapa de estudio de un hipertexto en el desarrollo de competencias cognitivas de hacer inferencias a diferentes niveles, por parte de estudiantes de educación media.</p><p>Hacer preguntas es la función de un agente artificial y se evalúa su efecto en el proceso de razonamiento de un agente natural. La generación de preguntas sirve al agente natural para que identifique lo que necesita aprender (Ram, 1991). En esta lógica se desarrolla un agente artificial que formula preguntas sobre el dominio de conocimiento de la geografía considerando tres niveles jerárquicos de la ontología usada en la representación.</p><p>Se compara el efecto producido en el desarrollo de la competencia cognitiva de hacer inferencias de sujetos que estudian un hipertexto diseñado con base en una estructura ontológica y otros que estudian el mismo hipertexto con el generador de preguntas que opera en cuatro configuraciones: generación de preguntas de primero, segundo o tercer nivel y configurable a voluntad del usuario.</p><p>El estudio muestra un efecto muy significativo de la ontología utilizada en la representación de conocimiento y del modelo adaptativo, sobre la capacidad de hacer inferencias, en contraste con la formulación de preguntas controlada por el computador. Contrario a lo esperado, el entrenamiento en preguntas de alto nivel no genera diferencias significativas con respecto al entrenamiento con preguntas de más bajo nivel y los resultados dan pie para sostener la hipótesis de efecto específico por nivel de entrenamiento.</p>

Identifying Symbolic Relationships in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Deficit in the Identification of Temporal Co-occurrence?

Individuals with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience difficulties understanding the non-verbal cues conveyed by others that provide symbolic information about relationships between self, other, and environmental events. This study examined whether these difficulties reflect underlying problems in the identification of temporal co-occurrence, or in memorial, associative, or inference skills. The performance of a group of adolescents with ASD was compared to that of typically developing children and adolescents with learning difficulties on four tasks assessing these processes. The ASD group experienced specific difficulties when they were required to identify relationships signalled by the temporal co-occurrence of stimuli. These results are discussed in relation to theories of conceptual deduction in ASD, and a hypothesised role in social cognitive development for attention processes is outlined.

DEVELOPING YOUNG STUDENTS’ INFORMAL INFERENCE SKILLS IN DATA ANALYSIS

This paper focuses on developing students’ informal inference skills, reporting on how a group of third grade students formulated and evaluated data-based inferences using the dynamic statistics data-visualization environment TinkerPlotsTM (Konold & Miller, 2005), software specifically designed to meet the learning needs of students in the early grades. Children analyzed collected data using TinkerPlots as an investigation tool, and made a presentation of their findings to the whole school. Findings from the study support the view that statistics instruction can promote the development of learners’ inferential reasoning at an early age, through an informal, data-based approach. They also suggest that the use of dynamic statistics software has the potential to enhance statistics instruction by making inferential reasoning accessible to young learners. First published November 2008 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

The Effect of Hot Executive Function on Children's Test with the Standard Windows Task

The windows task,a nonverbal measure,which was first used by Russell in 1991,is used to test children's strategic deception.Investigators such as Russell J,Hala S,and Carlson S M explored how the inhibitory control skill influenced 3-to 4-year-old children's performance on the windows task.Their results revealed that younger children were incapable of strategic deception.Moreover,reducing the difficulty of the executive demands could make the children improve performance on all 20 of their trials but not the first one.However,some researchers suggested that it was the ability to rule inference or theory of mind that challenged the young children.Thus,there were different arguments about why the children could not succeed in the windows task.In our opinion,the hot executive function may play an important role in children's performance on the test,because in the windows task,candies constitute the treat and encourage the children to compete with the opponent,who was played by experimenter 2.Our study tried to separate hot executive function factors from cool executive function factors concerning the windows task to examine whether and how the hot executive function factors affected children's performance on the task test.Further,it was hypothesized that emphasizing on the competition would cause the children to perform much worse.The experiment used a 3×3 between-group design.There were three experimental conditions as follows:standard condition,emphasized competition condition,and no-opponent condition.The experiment involved 270 participants,who were divided into 3 age groups.The experiment aimed to explore the cognitive development of 3-to 4-year-old children.Each condition included a training phase and a testing phase.Only the participants who passed the training phase could participate in the testing phase.The training phase was included to ensure that the children understood both the required response modes and the rules for winning the treat from the opponent.The response modes of the training phase matched those of the experimental conditions.Chi-Square analyses revealed that there were significant differences among the first trial performance of the three age groups as well as three conditions(age groups:χ2(2)= 28.665,p 0.001;conditions:χ2(2)= 8.305,p 0.05);however,the non-group performed higher than the random level on the first trial.The 3(age groups)×3(experimental conditions)two-way ANOVA analyses revealed that the main effects of both age groups and experimental conditions were significant(p 0.001),and the interaction between them was salient(p 0.05).Further,the simple effect analyses displayed that the three age groups performed differently in each condition,and the three conditions revealed differences in performance in each age group.The following conclusions were drawn:(1)hot executive function factors such as competition,treat,and emotions/motivation challenged the young children on the windows task;(2)the late 3-year-olds(about 3 years and 9 months old)represented the age boundary between 3-to 4-year-olds with regard to the windows task test;and(3)3-to 4-year-old children demonstrated some cognitive development tendencies in the windows task,such as the capacity of rule inference and inhibitory control skill.

Assessing reading at Key Stage 2: SATs as measures of children's inferential abilities

This article describes two studies. The first study was designed to investigate the ways in which the statutory assessments of reading for 11‐year‐old children in England assess inferential abilities. The second study was designed to investigate the levels of performance achieved in these tests in 2001 and 2002 by 11‐year‐old children attending state‐funded local authority schools in one London borough. In the first study, content and questions used in the reading papers for the Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) in the years 2001 and 2002 were analysed to see what types of inference were being assessed. This analysis suggested that the complexity involved in inference making and the variety of inference types that are made during the reading process are not adequately sampled in the SATs. Similar inadequacies are evident in the ways in which the programmes of study for literacy recommended by central government deal with inference. In the second study, scripts of completed SATs Reading papers for 2001 and 2002 were analysed to investigate the levels of inferential ability evident in scripts of children achieving different SATs levels. The analysis in this article suggests that children who only just achieve the ‘target’ Level 4 do so with minimal use of inference skills. They are particularly weak in making inferences that require the application of background knowledge. Thus, many children who achieve the reading level (Level 4) expected of 11‐year‐olds are entering secondary education with insecure inference‐making skills that have not been recognised.

First-year university L2 readers’ patterns of performance in a test of academic reading ability

This article presents findings from an investigation into the patterns of L2 readers’ performance in a test of reading ability. The test was first administered to an intact class of law students enrolled in an English and Academic Skills (EAS) course in 1999, at a historically black university in South Africa. When the student composition and the duration of the course changed, the study was replicated on a similar group of law students in 2001 to see if the performance of the students in the reading course in the two cohorts would be the same, or different. A qualitative analysis of the test results showed a consistent pattern of performance on both measures of reading ability, namely the cloze test and the comprehension test. Nevertheless, the quantitative results showed a different pattern. The 2001 cohort had higher means on both measures of reading ability than the 1999 cohort. Nevertheless, the students’ main reading problems were found to be similar regardless of cohort. Common to both cohorts were the reading difficulties related to weak analytical and critical reading skills and poorly developed inference skills. There was a significant difference in the pre- and post-test scores of the students in 2001 but not in 1999, indicating that the intervention given to these two cohorts had a better effect on the reading ability of students in the 2001 cohort. In view of the findings it is recommended that emphasis be placed on training first-year L2 readers in analytical, critical and inferential reasoning skills, and that these skills be reinforced in all courses.

Learning to Improve: Using Writing to Increase Critical Thinking Performance in General Education Biology

Increasingly, national stakeholders express concern that U.S. college graduates cannot adequately solve problems and think critically. As a set of cognitive abilities, critical thinking skills provide students with tangible academic, personal, and professional benefits that may ultimately address these concerns. As an instructional method, writing has long been perceived as a way to improve critical thinking. In the current study, the researchers compared critical thinking performance of students who experienced a laboratory writing treatment with those who experienced traditional quiz-based laboratory in a general education biology course. The effects of writing were determined within the context of multiple covariables. Results indicated that the writing group significantly improved critical thinking skills whereas the non-writing group did not. Specifically, analysis and inference skills increased significantly in the writing group but not the non-writing group. Writing students also showed greater gains in evaluation skills; however, these were not significant. In addition to writing, prior critical thinking skill and instructor significantly affected critical thinking performance, whereas other covariables such as gender, ethnicity, and age were not significant. With improved critical thinking skill, general education biology students will be better prepared to solve problems as engaged and productive citizens.

Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children

Young children's reading comprehension skill is associated with their ability to draw inferences (Oakhill 1982, 1984). An experiment was conducted to investigate the direction of this relation and to explore possible sources of inferential failure. Three groups of children participated: Same-age skilled and less skilled comprehenders, and a comprehension-age match group. The pattern of performance indicated that the ability to make inferences was not a by-product of good reading comprehension, rather that good inference skills are a plausible cause of good reading comprehension ability. Failure to make inferences could not be attributed to lack of relevant general knowledge. Instead, the pattern of errors indicated that differences in reading strategy were the most likely source of these group differences.

Questioning consciousness: the interplay of imagery, cognition, and emotion in the human brain

Questioning Consciousness brings together neuroscientific, psychological and phenomenological research, combining in a readable format recent developments in image research and neurology. It reassesses the mind-body relation and research on 'mental models', abstract concept formation, and acquisition of logical and apparently 'imageless' inference skills. It is argued that to be conscious of an object is essentially to imagine in a habituated way what would happen if we were to perform certain actions in relation to the object; and that mental images fit together to build up abstract concepts. This analysis shows why conscious information processing is so structurally different from — yet interrelated with — non-conscious processing, and how mind and body interrelate as a process to its substratum in the way that a sound wave relates to the medium through which it passes. (Series A)

The imagist approach to inferential thought patterns

Tmagists' hold that inferential thinking is built up from combinations of sensory and sensorimotor images in various patterns and modalities, and that the images are a more basic mental and neurophysiological operation than the logical thinking and conceptualization that are built up front them. 'Computationalists' hold just the opposite view — that images result from previous inferential processing which is more basic than the images. Suppose we define inference as the kind of thought process that we actually undergo when we do logical thinking, and not in the trivial sense in which any natural phenomenon which receives an 'input' from another then 'responds' to this 'input' (as for example when a ball responds to being hit by flying off at a certain angle). And suppose we define an 'image ' as any instance of imagining what it would be like to entertain some conscious state which we are not undergoing at the time — as for example when we imagine what it would be like to see something, to ride a roller coaster or to have a headache. I. e., 'images ' can be kinaesthetic and proprioceptive s well as sensory. Then it can be shown that inferential thinking is built up from patterns of images, including importantly the imaging of rhythm patterns corresponding to logical syntax. Furthermore, the acquisition of these inference rules can also be traced to a process of trying to imagine scenarios which might serve as counterexamples to the rules, and this kind of 'imagining ' can also be explained in terms of both sensory and proprioceptive images. The reason for this is twofold: First, even the apparently 'imageless ' concepts used to imagine such scenarios (e.g., the concept 'president') consist in each case of a feeling of preparedness to entertain a pattern of images which would be appropriate to provide a directly or indirectly ostensive definition of the concept in question, and this feeling of preparedness can be sensed proprioceptively. Secondly, a concept, even if it is not experienced as involving imagery, may nonetheless occur as an element of a larger pattern whose rhythm can be imaged. This paper defends an expanded version of the imagist approach, suggesting an important pragmatic role for the proprioceptive sensing of rhythm patterns in the acquisition and use of inference skills.

Cognitive ability and drinking behavior in a national sample of young adults.

The role of verbal intelligence (VI) as an antecedent and moderator of alcohol-related problems was investigated for a national sample of young adults. A measure of VI was used to predict alcohol related behavior 5 years later. Results indicated that lower VI was associated with lower risk for drinking per se. Lower VI was also associated with higher risk for alcohol-related problems among those who drink. These findings were robust across gender, age, and to a large extent across different areas of alcohol related problems. Cognitive-behavioral functions associated with intelligence, such as social judgement, social inference, and social skills, are proposed as possible moderators of the relationship between intelligence and alcohol-related problems.

Social inference skills in learning disabled and nondisabled children

The study examined the performance of 30 learning disabled and 30 nondisabled children in grades 1 through 7 on the Test of Social Inference (TSI). Results indicated that disabled students obtained lower TSI total scores that did nondisabled students: they also performed relatively lower on TSI items requiring more verbal expression. While no difference was found between the groups on the Motor-Free Visual Perception Test (MVPT), the relationship between MVPT and TSI scores was shown to be significant within the disabled group only. Furthermore, this group made more perceptual-type errors on the TSI. Findings are discussed in relation to previous research suggesting a link between visual perception and/or language fluency and social inference skills among learning disabled children.

An Analysis of the Effects of Two Procedures for Increasing Disabled Readers’ Influencing Skills

Effects of two procedures for increasing students’ ability to draw inferences when reading were studied. Eighty fifth-grade disabled readers were presented with one of the following: a) opportunities to use previous experiences in predicting story outcomes (strategy method); b) practice in answering inference questions (question method); or c) traditional reading instruction (control method). Strategy and question groups’ scores on end-of-story tests were significant^ higher for inference questions than those of the controls. These results support the use of both the strategy and question procedures for teaching inference skills to disabled readers.

Towards Intelligent Viewing: The Role of Editing in Cultivating Inference Skills

Towards Intelligent Viewing: The Role of Editing in Cultivating Inference Skills

If the boy loves the girl and the girl loves the dog, does the boy love the dog?: The overgeneralization of verbal transitive inference skills

Two studies investigated 4- to 10-year-old children's capacity to make verbal transitive inferences. The results of the two studies suggest that the development of transitive inference skills follows a specific to general developmental path, and that children overgeneralize their verbal transitive inference skills to inappropriate relational terms prior to determining the general principle that underlies the use of relational terms in transitive sentences.