Successful comprehension is only possible when children draw inferences about ideas implicit or missing in discourse. Supporting inference-making with explicit instruction must start early given its importance in comprehension and knowledge development. However, students who experience difficulties with early reading skills often do not receive…

Main idea and summary are essential elements of reading comprehension. We report results from Grades 4 and 5 student performance on two years of state-mandated standardized reading testing which indicate that students perform statistically significantly lower on main idea and summary questions on the tests than any other question category. In this…