BACKGROUND Low health literacy is associated with poorer health and higher mortality. Complex health materials are a barrier to health. AIM To assess the literacy and numeracy skills required to understand and use commonly used English health information materials, and to describe population skills in relation to these. DESIGN AND SETTING An English observational study comparing health mate...

BACKGROUND Inadequate health literacy has been associated with poor management of long-term health conditions and has been identified as a key social determinant of health outcomes. However, little is understood about how health literacy might develop over time or the processes by which people may become more health literate. Our objectives were to describe how patients with a long-term conditi...

This study aims to investigate how pre-service teachers' visual literacy skills are affected by their use of online photo management and sharing applications like Flickr. Two approaches are used to develop the visual literacy skills of pre-service teachers through Flickr. The first is to help them decode visuals through practicing analysis techniques, and interpreting and creating meaning from ...

Jacqui Weetman DaCosta is Information Literacy Librarian at The College of New Jersey Library; e-mail: [email protected]. © Jacqui Weetman DaCosta Surveys of faculty were conducted at two higher education institutions in England and the United States to ascertain their perceptions of information literacy. Faculty were also asked about the extent to which they incorporated information literacy sk...

Primary argument Cardiovascular disease is a major health concern in Australia. Most cardiovascular diseases can be prevented and managed by reducing the cardiovascular risk factors. However healthcare professions, including nurses, may overestimate the health literacy skills of adults, and result in ineffective communication and misunderstanding. Adults with inadequate health literacy skills a...

Although traditional and digital media skills contain many similarities, digital media literacy increases the differences observed in traditional literacy. On the one hand computers and the Internet make things easier as they enable systematic information retrieval from innumerable sources simultaneously. At the other hand computers and the Internet make information seeking and improving litera...

This family-risk (FR) study examined whether the literacy skills of parents with dyslexia are predictive of the literacy skills of their offspring. We report data from 31 child-parent dyads where both had dyslexia (FR-D) and 68 dyads where the child did not have dyslexia (FR-ND). Findings supported the differences in liability of FR children with and without dyslexia: the parents of the FR-D ch...

Health literacy is “the degree to which individuals can obtain, process, and understand the basic health information and services they need to make appropriate health decisions.” It represents a constellation of skills necessary for people to function effectively in the health care environment and act appropriately on health care information. These skills include the ability to interpret docume...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have penetrated all areas of contemporary life. In this context, digital literacy has become much more than the ability to handle computers – just like traditional literacy and numeracy, it comprises a set of basic skills which include the use and production of digital media, information processing and retrieval, participation in social networks...

The home literacy environment (HLE) predicts language and reading development in typically developing children; relatively little is known about its association with literacy development in children at family-risk of dyslexia. We assessed the HLE at age 4 years, precursor literacy skills at age 5, and literacy outcomes at age 6, in a sample of children at family-risk of dyslexia (n = 116) and c...