OBJECTIVES To assess the prevalence of low health literacy among adolescents, young adults, and child caregivers in the United States, the readability of common child-health information, and the relationship between literacy and child health. DATA SOURCES MedLine, Educational Resources Information Center, National Library of Medicine, PsychInfo, Harvard Health Literacy Bibliography, and peer-...

Patients vary in their preferences towards involvement in medical decision-making. Previous research, however, gives no clear explanation for this observed variation in their involvement. One possible explanation might be health literacy. Health literacy refers to personal characteristics and social resources needed for people to access, understand and use information to make decisions about th...

BACKGROUND Inadequate health literacy affects more than 90 million Americans and it has been associated with adverse outcomes in the medicine field including increased hospitalization rates and greater mortality. Since surgical patients are often required to make complex decisions and adhere to complex instructions, health literacy may have a profound impact in the surgical practice. The main o...

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...

There are a range of barriers precluding patients from fully engaging in and benefiting from the spectrum of eHealth interventions developed to support patient access to health information, disease self-management efforts, and patient-provider communication. Consumers with low eHealth literacy skills often stand to gain the greatest benefit from the use of eHealth tools. eHealth skills are comp...

Computer literacy, digital literacy, information literacy, and a host of other terms have all been used to attempt to appropriately describe particular competencies that an individual must know in the information age. However, literacy, of any type, in the information era should not be defined without including the tools that allow one to become more literate and eventually reap the benefits of...

Digital literacy involves more than the mere ability to use software or operate a digital device; it includes a large variety of complex cognitive, motor, sociological, and emotional skills, which users need in order to function effectively in digital environments. The tasks required in this context include, for example, “reading” instructions from graphical displays in user interfaces; using d...

The Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services now administer a variety of social programs that incorporate literacy training. Adult Basic Education (ABE), English as a Second Language (ESL), JOBS, workplace literacy, family literacy, library literacy, and correctional institution education are the primary examples of these programs, but others exist that either provide lite...

Purpose: The role off data literacy is discussed in the light of such activities as data a quality, data management, data curation, and data citation. The differing terms and its relationship to the most important literacies are examined. Approach: By stressing the importance of data literacy in fulfilling the mission of the contemporary academic library, the article takes an interdisciplinary ...

Critical literacy is widely practiced in classrooms in many countries and across levels of education. Research that explores critical literacy in English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms, however, remains scarce. The few studies that do exist focus on development of critical literacy without explicit attention to development of language skills (see, ...