Observation/Inference Chart Found to Improve Student Learning

Jeffery Nokes

Learning is a complicated process. Jeffery Nokes, long-time educator and clinical faculty associate at the McKay School, recently developed a strategy to improve critical learning, which he described in an article titled "The Observation/Inference Chart: Improving Students' Abilities to Make Inferences While Reading Nontraditional Texts" in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. The observation inference (OI) chart is a system that helps students of all ages learn to critically examine nontraditional texts to learn more about the circumstances surrounding them.

The process is simple: The student makes a T-chart on a piece of paper and labels one side observations and the other side inferences. He then carefully examines the text or artifact, records observations he makes, and begins to form inferences based on those observations. The student then draws arrows connecting the inferences to the observations on which they are based.

"It is a good way of helping students analyze pictures, paintings, and artifacts-non-print texts," Nokes said, "to try to get information out of things on which they normally don't get much instruction." He explained how the process helps students think critically about texts by providing the support they need-"scaffolding," according to Nokes-to extract information. Such support consists of receiving teacher instruction, observing more experienced readers, and choosing additional simple texts to examine.

Nokes developed the system as a public school teacher. "It comes from a combination of middle school, high school, and adult high school classes," he said. "I taught at middle schools for twelve years and then high schools for three years, and I have been teaching adult high school classes for ten years."

In the article Nokes develops three rationales for using the OI chart system. The first is that the chart helps students make inferences; second, it helps them think deeply about a text; and third, it helps students to learn metacognition.

"The best inferences are usually very simple explanations," Nokes elaborated. "They are based on observations, but they also bring in background knowledge and logic." According to Nokes, the OI chart allows students to teach each other with simplicity. "If you spell out how the quicker kids are doing it, and have them take a step back and ask themselves, 'what observations are these inferences based on?' it helps the kids who struggle to learn from their peers."

Most educators face the challenge of helping kids to think deeply on an assigned subject. "Simply giving students a text to read and time in class to read it, then asking them to 'Think!' may not result in deep thinking, but in wasted class time," Nokes' article states. According to Nokes, the OI chart promotes a rapid flow of ideas that helps students to stay engaged and think deeply about the text.

Metacognition is defined as awareness and understanding of one's own thought process. As stated in Nokes'article, the IO chart helps students break the inference process into stages of cognition, thereby helping them understand and make connections to what they are thinking and why.

4 April 2008