Establishing the norm of new media literacy of Singaporean students: Implications to policy and pedagogy

With the increasing impact of new media, Singapore has responded to the fast-changing media environment within the educational sector. A large-scale study was conducted in Singaporean schools to establish the norm of Singaporean students’ new media literacy. This was based on a conceptual framework of new media literacy (Lin et al., 2013). The development and validation of the measurement instrument can be found in Lee et al. (2015). This paper focuses on findings from the main study. A total of 4577 students, between 10 and 15 years old, from 52 schools participated in the study. That is, one-seventh of the Singaporean schools were involved in this survey study. To our best knowledge, there has not been any other study like this one carried out within the Asian context. Therefore, the findings offer valuable insights in theorizing new media and media literacy as well as for policy-makers and educators in countries with similar new media ecologies. Implications of this study suggest that it is possible to achieve gender equality for new media literary education. They also point to a new direction of inquiry by exploring new media literacy from a second language learning perspective.