Making Inferences About Texts IEP Goals
Updated: December 23, 2025. Reviewer: Dr. Rose Sebastian, Ed.D.
Browse CCS-aligned, reading comprehension IEP goals focused on making inferences
These Common Core aligned reading comprehension goals for upper elementary, middle school, and high school (grades 4-12) focus on students’ abilities to make inferences about what they read. Inferential comprehension is often the hardest for students. They get good at answering questions where the answers are right there in the text– but the questions that make them put pieces together and read between the lines are often much more challenging than students. You can see it on reading assessments where students answer question after question on what the text says correctly but then when asked what it means or why something happened draw a blank, read from the text, or rely on prior knowledge. These are the IEP goals for those students– the ones who can decode, have basic vocabulary, and understand the basic points of the story but struggle to succeed in the general education classes because the miss the hidden stuff in texts.
The Common Core has standards on making inferences from fiction texts from fourth grade onwards-- and so that's where our goals start!
In grades 6, 7, and 8 learning how to make inferences about a character or event from a text-- and to support that inference-- is an essential skills. So check out our goal ideas!
High school IEP goals can be tricky to figure out-- and find-- so check out these 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade CCS aligned reading comprehension goals.
