ANPS TC 2019

Critical thinking is one of the key 21 st  century
competencies in today's society, and as
educators, we hope that our students would be
able to employ the use of critical thinking
seamlessly in their life. This presentation aims to
show how educators can impart the fundamental
source-based skill of checking for reliability
by challenging students' over-reliance on the
internet as the providence of reliable information.
Living in the age of IT, students often find
themselves in situations where they are
encouraged to use a variety of information beyond
what is learnt from textbooks and classrooms.
When doing so, they run into a barrage of
information which may be skewed and unreliable.


Hence, imparting in them the ability to think
critically would enable them to check for sources'
reliability and inevitably facilitate the process of
selecting information with due discernment.
As educators of Humanities, we believe that there
is no one way of defining reliable or unreliable
sources. We acknowledge that no given source
can be truly objective in nature, and to find one
that is written without motive and perspective is
almost impossible. Hence, this lesson aims to
encourage students to think of the concept of
reliability as a spectrum.
As students analyse the sources with the various
given criteria at hand, they are able to see the
strengths and weaknesses of each given source.
With this analysis, they will then place the sources
on the spectrum, lining them up from one that is
most reliable to one that is most unreliable. This
activity concretizes their thinking process which
would allow them to understand how informed
judgement (by virtue of understanding the nature
of information they face daily), would enable them
to make an informed decision. The end-product at
the end of the day, is a more discerning
generation, capable of navigating through the
ambiguities in life.