Detective Questions

Abstract

One of the most frequent problems in reading comprehension is the difficulty in making inferences from the text, especially for students with mild disabilities (i.e., children with learning disabilities or with high-functioning autism). It is essential, therefore, that educators include the teaching of reading strategies to improve their students’ ability to extract inferential information from texts. This article describes one such strategy for improving inference-making called “Detective Questions.” It is a strategy that, in an explicit and scaffolded way, teaches children to discriminate between inferential and literal information and to find the information they need to answer questions on the text. The inclusion of this type of strategy improves children’s reading comprehension in a motivating way and may therefore become an essential part of the teacher’s repertoire of techniques for teaching reading.