Tips for parents on helping kids boost critical reading skills

If you get your news online or from social media, how do you determine if it is reliable or fake?

With anyone now able to publish information online, it is becoming harder to distinguish fact from fiction.

A simple way to help parents and children get credible information is to use search engines more effectively by specifying the topic and confirming information sources, said Mr Mervin Ang, manager (outreach) at the National Library Board (NLB).

He was speaking to The Straits Times' senior education correspondent Sandra Davie during an askST@NLB discussion about relearning how to read.

The virtual talk, a collaboration between The Straits Times and NLB, was shared on ST's Facebook page last night.

Mr Ang also weighed in on the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa). Pisa 2018 found that some among 600,000 young people from 79 countries lacked the skills to read with discernment, including the ability to differentiate between fact and opinion, when they were online.

While Singapore ranked second for reading and has the largest share of top performers, only one in four Singapore students reached the highest proficiency levels of five or six for reading with discernment. This means three in four had yet to master that skill.

Mr Ang said the difficulty young people may have when assessing the credibility of information could be attributed to two factors - their reading habits and the amount of technology they are exposed to. "In Singapore, we have such a high rate of Internet penetration, and most of our youth have a smart device. We have also seen all the trends of social media such as on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube," he said.

He added that one commonality among social media formats is that they tend to be in a short form to cater to the short attention span of youth today.

"It does not help if they were to go to a search engine. A mouse click for any search results will lead to tens of millions of results.

"This information overload, compounded with the short form media format, takes away the level of comprehension and critical assessment," Mr Ang said.

He also noted how NLB has played its part by stepping up efforts to teach critical thinking skills in the fight against misinformation, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2013, NLB launched the S.U.R.E (Source, Understand, Research, Evaluate) programme to promote information literacy awareness to the public, which boils down to four things - check the source, understand the information, do deeper research and evaluate the information critically.

Ms Davie and Mr Ang also discussed whether social media has replaced reading after a parent raised concern about this during the askST session.

Ms Davie said: "If you mean reading with good comprehension and understanding, I would say yes, it has been impacted. There's a lot of research on reading online - people are not as focused and their retention is not as good because we tend to skim when we are reading online, more so than when reading on print."

She added that research shows that if parents want to help their children read printed books instead of e-books, they need to be involved, such as sitting with the child to go through the printed books together.

Another parent asked for recommendations of online sites that her 14-year-old son could access for leisure or to help him grasp current affairs issues.

Mr Ang recommended the Read to be SURE section on NLB's S.U.R.E website, where NLB staff take trending contemporary topics to curate and write about, and assess the different trends with a balanced perspective.

One of its articles explored whether fast fashion is good or bad for the industry. Others touched on Covid-19 curbs, cryptocurrencies and the Russia-Ukraine information war.

The video recording of this askST@NLB event and previous sessions can be found here: str.sg/askstnlb

The next askST @ NLB session will be held on June 24.