Pupils are reading beyond their age and also have the comprehension and inference skills to deduce quite complex information.
A substantial positive shift was observed at the end of the quarter, with 87% of the students rating their interpretation and inference skills as good (29%), very good (37%), or excellent (21%; Figure 3).
Those 70 items covered five diabetes self-management areas (nutrition, exercise, glucose monitoring, oral medication and insulin use) and the general mathematical skills required in the management of diabetes including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions/decimals, numerical hierarchy, inference skills and multi-step calculations.
We believe that it will be of interest in the future to test the effects of additional group activities specifically targeting interpretation, inference, and evaluation skills.
However, using a science-process skills test, we detected a statistically significant increase in students' ability to propose an experiment that matches the goals of investigation, interpretation of controls, and quantitative analysis of data, but we did not see a similar increase in responses to questions assessing the skills of inference and evaluation.
The 'A' analysis section gives the student the opportunity to extend and refine knowledge, using higher order skills of inference, comparison and abstraction.
In recent years there has been an increasing international interest in fine-grained diagnostic inferences on multiple skills for formative purposes.
So, for example, one week we may suggest several ways to teach the skill of making inferences, while another we may list ideas for helping students read infographics.
No statistically significant changes were observed in questions that tested the skills of interpretation, inference, and evaluation.
Benefits can be mapped to improved professional skills, and by inference improved patient care, and to measurable professional development outcomes.
However, we observed no statistically significant gains in the postcourse scores in questions assessing the skills of interpretation, inference, and evaluation of data.
