Abstract
Reading comprehension is the goal of reading, and making inferences is vital. Authors usually expect readers to make multiple types of inferences, including anaphoric, background knowledge, predictive, and retrospective. Common core assessments include all of these, yet instructional materials focus mostly on only one type, retrospective. This article describes how teachers in one school district in the Inter-Mountain West used each inference type to enhance instruction. They found that although common core materials provided them with some inferencing questions, they gave minimal support in how to teach inferences. These teachers successfully supplemented with Question-Answer Relationships (QAR), think-alouds, and sentence frames. By explicitly teaching all four inference types, inferencing took its place as the cornerstone of reading comprehension and helped students deepen their knowledge.