I have this habit of making inferences about what I have observe and what I have read. I do that all the time because that is part of critical thinking. Here I  do not mean critical just in the negative sense. I draw conclusions as best as I can. Most of the time, in life, you cannot wait for someone to appear and tell you what events mean. Of course, my conclusions can be wrong but then again just tell me why. That is fine with me.

What in my view is sadder, is that people do not want to or are reluctant to infer. Worse, some don’t seem able to make inferences. Someone, once told me how she had gathered a group of parents to teach them about reading to their children. She told me she held one of those “big books” and sat in front of the parents and asked them what they thought the book was about. All of them said they didn’t know and one explained that they wouldn’t know because both she and the parents had not read the book. She pointed out to me that the book that she was holding had a beautiful cover illustration and of course the title. She was amazed that the parents could not make any inference about the story by looking at the cover and the title.

This little anecdote illustrates a few things. Oops! I nearly told you what they are. Perhaps, you will like to make your inferences about what they are?

I just got home from a polyclinic in the northeastern part of Singapore. I had sent my mother for her regular medical check-up. Her appointment card stated clearly she had an appointment today. When I arrived there we dutifully went to the an automatic registration machine to register our presence for the appointment. The machine announced that we didn’t have an appointment. The duty officer also said we had no appointment and we had to wait in the queue for one hour to get “an appointment”. When I asked why I had to do that, her answer was a flippant, “Oh the system has changed!”

Later at the registration counter a staff member asked me if my mother had an appointment to be at the clinic. I asked her, “When is an appointment and appointment since the machine said we didn’t while my mother’s card said we did?“

A similar thing can be seen in the Forum Page of today’s Straits Times. The Assistant Director (Media Relations, the Singapore Police Force), was replying to a query from a reader who had asked why his diploma which was not from a local polytechnic, was not accepted for his application to a position in the force while that of the five local polytechnics was accepted.

The reply from the Assistant Director was:

“The entry requirement for diploma positions in the Singapore Police Force, like the rest of the Singapore Civil Service, is a polytechnic diploma.

For the purpose of recruitment, the diploma qualifications from our local polytechnics are used as a benchmark for assessing the standard and rigour of other diploma programmes.”

The Assistant Director is clearly only engaged in bureaucratic babble. First he passes the buck and says it is standard practice in the Civil Service. Then he says that the diplomas from the local polytechnics is the benchmark to compare other diploma programmes. Has he answered the initial query?

At first glance, it is as if he has, but surely anyone can see that the initial query is about why the Singapore Police Force only used the local polytechnic diplomas as the standard? To put it in another way, the job applicant was asking why his diploma was not good enough. To answer that it is not good enough because it doesn’t meet the benchmark is certainly an example of circular reasoning.

Furthermore, to say that the five polytechnics are used as benchmarks does not explain whether that particular job applicant’s diploma has met the benchmark or otherwise. The Singapore Police Force wants us to infer from this statement that the other diplomas (and therefore the issuing institutions) are of inferior quality. They won’t say it for legal reasons perhaps. It is left to the readers to infer. So when is an answer an answer?

Before the age of the “talkies”, there was the silent movie era where movie stars graced the silver screen minus any sound except for the sound of some pianist in the movie theater. Occasionally, you will see some text dialog appear on screen so that the audience can keep pace with the story. Some of us may have watched videos or movies with the volume turned off. Of course it is strange to be watching the moving pictures without the sound. But with the pictures, we can still make good inferences about the possible dialog or even story line.

We can use this approach for teaching inference skills to our students. Choose an appropriate video. It can be clips  a documentary or a news broadcast or even a short story. I would not recommend a long one for practical reasons.

Play the video in your class with the intention that the students use the visual clues to guess what is being said. The students can be asked to pay attention to familiar scenes or faces for contextualizing. The students can be reminded to use their prior knowledge of things to make more sense of what they are viewing.

Get them to write in groups a possible script for the video clip that they have seen. Replay the clip as and when is necessary. Get the class to share their script by reading it as the clip is being replayed. When they have done so, show the clip with volume on.

Get the rest of the students to compare the student-created scripts against the original video clip’s script. How similar were their scripts to the original and how different were they? Remember this is not about getting an exact match. It is about getting something which is reasonable and acceptable and consistent with the visual clues they see in the clip. This is what making inferences is all about.