When U.S. children enter school, their reading skills vary widely by their socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and immigrant status. Because these literacy gaps exist before children enter school, observes Jane Waldfogel, the disparities must arise from conditions outside of schools--from the children's families and communities. And the same out-of-school factors may continue to influence...

Purpose of the Study. Given the shift toward an increasingly knowledge-based economy, educators and employers have expressed the desire to emphasize students’ information literacy. Being information literate extends beyond the classroom setting and provides skills for independent investigations needed in internships and professional positions in marketing. However, in order to most effectively ...

The notion of digital literacy is rapidly gaining coherence and visibility as a major focus in UK universities and more widely in Europe for a cluster of non-subject-specific attitudes, skills and competences appropriate to digital societies. This paper argues that there is an obvious mobile component or addition to these and that this would a tactical improvement to the digital literacy agenda...

The technological advancement and proliferation of information resources has precipitated the increase of information stored in electronic format, providing wider and varied information choices to individuals. Lack of necessary computer competencies and skills are contributing factors in hindering the users from accessing, retrieving, evaluating and selecting relevant information from electroni...

In this paper we address questions regarding the assessment of literacy, exploring the idea that practical judgements made in specific communities of practice are the phenomena at the intersection of validity for (1) local sites and (2) administrative systems. We propose a template for considering the challenges facing systems, administrators and teachers as they work to validly assess the impo...

The validity of three subtests of the Dynamic Indicators for Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) was investigated for kindergarten children in a large urban school district. A stratified, random sample of 330 participants was drawn from an entire cohort of kindergarten children. Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency evidenced significant concurrent and ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES No practical method for identifying patients with low heath literacy exists. We sought to develop screening questions for identifying patients with inadequate or marginal health literacy. METHODS Patients (n=332) at a VA preoperative clinic completed in-person interviews that included 16 health literacy screening questions on a 5-point Likert scale, followed by a val...

BACKGROUND As patient advocates, oncology nurses must attend to varying levels of health literacy among patients and families. However, little is known about nurses' experiences and comfort with health literacy assessment and providing health literacy support.
. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study is to explore nurse communication and patient health literacy.
. METHODS A cross-sectional su...

Parents, librarians and educators alike are invested in children learning to read. The library storytime provides a unique opportunity to introduce skills essential to pre-literacy development. This article reviews the literature on school-aged children and applies these findings as a basis for activities appropriate for pre-readers. Important areas for the development of pre-literacy are ident...

BACKGROUND Health literacy is a critically important skill that helps people become active participants in their health care. Multiple studies in the United States and across the world have documented the association of health literacy with multiple health outcomes. In particular, the elderly and many members of minority groups have been shown to have low levels of health literacy; the same gro...