OBJECTIVE To describe a process for developing low-literacy health education materials that increase knowledge and activate patients toward healthier behaviors. METHODS We developed a theoretically informed process for developing educational materials. This process included convening a multidisciplinary creative team, soliciting stakeholder input, identifying key concepts to be communicated, ...

This chapter compares the conceptual foundations of health literacy and health disparities. It details some of the conceptual differences between health literacy and health disparities and explains some similarities that suggest the need for increased research collaboration. The chapter is among the first to address the structural and social determinants of health together and explain that futu...

OBJECTIVE It is essential to train health care providers to deliver care sensitive to the needs of diverse individuals with varying degrees of health literacy. We aimed to evaluate an innovative, theory-based, educational intervention involving social marketing and health literacy. METHODS In 2006 at a large medical school, all first-year students were exposed to the intervention. They comple...

This paper presents the theory, design and evaluation of a new type of computer-supported collaborative interface intended to help young children practice certain oral language skills critical for later written literacy acquisition. Based on a theory of “emergent literacy”, this paper describes a toy – TellTale – designed to let young children create, share and edit oral language in a way simil...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present the Information Literacy Instruction Assessment Cycle (ILIAC), to describe the seven stages of the ILIAC, and to offer an extended example that demonstrates how the ILIAC increases librarian instructional abilities and improves student information literacy skills. Design/methodology/approach – Employing survey design methodology, the researcher and ...

he Mitten, Little Bear, Caps for Sale—What do these and so many other books in early childhood classrooms have in common? They are stories or narrative texts. Research indicates that storybooks are indeed the most common type of text found in early childhood classrooms (Duke, Bennett-Armistead, & Roberts 2002). Literacy research and theory both provide lots of good reasons for including so many...

This article presents a tripartite framework for analyzing multimodal texts. The three analytical perspectives presented include: (1) perceptual, (2) structural, and (3) ideological analytical processes. Using Anthony Browne’s picturebook Piggybook as an example, assertions are made regarding what each analytical perspective brings to the interpretation of multimodal texts and how these perspec...

Literacies VICKY DUCKWORTH Edge Hill University, United Kingdom GORDON ADE-OJO University of Greenwich, United Kingdom This special issue of the International journal of multidisciplinary comparative studies (IJMCS) is drawn from the papers presented at the week-long Research Workshop, run by Literacy Research and Development Centre (LRDC) at the University of Greenwich. The papers were accompa...

This study investigates whether the core bottleneck of literacy-impairment should be situated at the phonological level or at a more basic sensory level, as postulated by supporters of the auditory temporal processing theory. Phonological ability, speech perception and low-level auditory processing were assessed in a group of 5-year-old pre-school children at high-family risk for dyslexia, comp...

Standard policy prescriptions for improving public health in less developed countries (LDCs) prioritise raising average income levels over redistributive policies since it is widely accepted that 'wealthier is healthier'. It is argued that income inequality becomes a significant predictor of public health only after the 'epidemiological transition'. This paper tests this theory in India, where ...