An instructional study: Improving the inferential comprehension of good and poor fourth-grade readers.

Four classroom teachers were trained to provide instruction to improve the inferential comprehension ability of good and poor fourth-grade students.The experimental treatment consisted of three parts: (a) making students aware of the importance of relating new information to existing knowledge structures, (b) getting students to speculate, prior to reading, about what they would do in the protagonist's situation and to predict what the protagonist would do, and (c) answering lots of inferential questions.The results indicated that poor readers tended to benefit from the instruction more substantially than did good readers.This differential effect was explained in terms of the different aptitudes and instructional histories that differentiate good and poor readers in our schools.In addition, the data were used to evaluate the feasibility of training teachers to alter their instructional strategies.