Provinha Brasil aims to evaluate the Brazilian students' literacy level in the 2nd year of elementary school. In 2009, there were two editions of Provinha Brasil: at the beginning of the school year, in order to assess the literacy process, and at the end of the school year, in order to compare the students' performance with the first evaluation and to identify progresses and limitations. Among the skills under evaluation, the ability to infer information based on text reading stands out. In the 2009 second edition, based on a comic strip by Mauricio de Sousa, the twentieth question is related to this skill descriptor. Motivated by the dispersion of responses to this question by ten literacy teachers in Nazario's 2010 dissertation, proposition and response options of the twentieth question were analyzed based on Relevance Theory. It is argued that there are difficulties for the development of alternative options to inferential questions, since more sophisticated inferences and different degrees of strength of cognitive assumptions may be at stake.
Cognition; Inference; Relevance; Relevance theory; Provinha Brasil
