BACKGROUND While health literacy has gained notice on a global stage, the initial focus on seeking associations with medical conditions may have overlooked its impact across generations. Adolescent health literacy, specifically in dentistry, is an underexplored area despite the significance of this formative stage on an individual's approach to healthy lifestyles and behaviors. OBJECTIVE The ...

The In Focus section of this issue of IAU Horizons examines the issues surrounding tuition fees in a series of analyses by authors Vice-Chancellors and higher education experts from the USA, UK, Sweden, South Africa, Thailand, Korea and Australia. A global perspective is provided by Eric Charbonnier, of the OECD Education and Competences Unit, who identifies four different tuition fee models an...

This paper builds on the collaborative work of media researchers and professionals as well as education decision makers and teachers that met in Graz, 57 December 2007, at the invitation of the Council of Europe. The purpose of the workshop was to determine the validity of media education and to verify that human rights could be an added value to such an education. Three main questions were deb...

Although media literacy represents an innovative venue for school-based antismoking programming, studies have not systematically compared student impressions of these and traditional programs. This study utilized data from a randomized trial comparing these two types of programs. After each program, students responded to three open-ended questions related to their assigned curriculum. Two coder...

W hen I ask people to define, in one or two sentences, the word literacy—what literacy is and what it enables people to do—the answers I receive are quite similar. To most people, literacy means the ability to read and write, to understand information, and to express ideas both concretely and abstractly. The unstated assumption is that “to read and write” means to read and write text. Although ...

Exposure to media images of thin-and-beautiful women negatively affects the body image and mood states of young women. However, not all women are equally susceptible to these effects. The present experimental investigation with 123 young college women evaluated the moderating effects of the extent of internalization of media ideals. It also examined the preventative impact of two brief interven...

A long and yet unfinished history of investigating how individual capabilities and social processes explain or predict health indicates that poor education, low literacy, poor health and early death are strongly linked around the world. However, the complexity of those relationships is not fully understood. In this article, we propose an expanded model of health literacy characterized by four d...

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...