Critical Reading: How not to get fooled by what you read

(This course is targeted at children entering Grades 8, 9, 10 in 2020-21)

We read news, magazines and books all the time. These may say things like ‘Virat Kohli is the greatest batsman of all time’, ‘Dark chocolate is good for health’ or ‘The great wall of China can be seen from Space’. How do we know if what we read is true- should we believe what we read in ‘reputed sources’ and disbelieve sources we don’t know about? Is there a way we can check the claims made, on our own, to decide if these are true, false or partly true? Critical reading is an essential skill for everyone in today’s world in which there is as much misinformation as there is information, with writers having vested interests or biases.

In this course, students will learn to evaluate if claims are justified, by examining the grounds (basis) for these and checking if the claim is a valid conclusion from the grounds. Through this course, students can build a habit of identifying the central claims of a piece, asking the right questions to evaluate the veracity of these claims, and also considering information that may not be present in the piece but is relevant to the evaluation. Thus students would accept or reject a claim or ‘keep it on hold’ only after sound reasoning.

Learn more about our expert course facilitator, Sriram Naganathan, here.