Abstract

Preschoolers’ inferential skills are a strong predictor of their vocabulary, story comprehension, and later reading comprehension. Preservice educators can play an important role in supporting these skills, but often lack knowledge about inferencing and inferential questions and strategies to support inferencing in early childhood settings. This study investigated the effectiveness of an instructional unit (including direct teaching; reading, observing, and reflecting; and practicing the targeted strategies) aimed at developing preservice educators’ knowledge about children's inferencing skills as a component of emergent literacy, and about strategies to support such skills during storybook reading.
Participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group that received instruction focused on asking inferential questions (n = 13) or a comparison group (n = 12), that received instruction on print referencing, another means of supporting emergent literacy. In both groups, knowledge about emergent literacy and inferencing was evaluated via a questionnaire, and their use of inferential questions was investigated via a role play. Mixed ANOVA demonstrated that both groups increased their emergent literacy knowledge significantly from pretest to posttest, as expected. However, as hypothesized, only participants in the experimental group improved significantly in their knowledge about inferencing and inferential questions from pretest to posttest. The role play data further showed that the experimental group significantly increased the frequency and diversity of inferential questions from pretest to posttest, and surpassed the comparison group on these measures at posttest. These results have direct implications for education and professional development for preservice educators.