Revising a Document About Sugar and the Body for UD Intensive English Program Students

Having adequate health literacy is important in order for someone to be able to understand medical information that is presented to them. On UD’s campus, a large number of international students speak English as their second language. For this project, we worked with the Intensive English Program (IEP) students to create a brochure about sugar and the body that is more understandable and usable for their literacy level. We met with the IEP students at the beginning of the project to see what they already understood and what they wanted to learn more about. While the average American reading level is 8th grade, the IEP students in this course read at approximately a 3rd-4th-grade level. The goal of our project was to modify an existing document to make it readable and usable for the IEP students. The document we chose came from betterhealth.vic.gov.au. We first analyzed the four domains of health literacy by performing a Health Literacy Load Analysis in order to improve the readability in our final brochure. We field tested the draft with the IEP students once more before finalizing the brochure to gain feedback on their understanding of the material. The completion of the final document was followed with a SMOG and Word test and determined that the reading level was reduced significantly. This project showed us that it is possible to reduce a health document to a lower reading level in order to more effectively communicate health information.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/2702/thumbnail.jp