Report from #ecil2014 - Developing a Strategy for Effective Health Information Literacy Instruction Using a Neurocognitive Model for Dual-Processing

Today is the final day of the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Dubrovnik and I'll start by blogging a presentation from Ivonne Ramirez who talked on Developing a Strategy for Effective Health Information Literacy Instruction Using a Neurocognitive Model for Dual-Processing. The speaker definied health information literacy instruction as Access and retrieval of high quality health information for decision making. She identified the many groups who had a role in teaching health information literacy (see slide): an interesting list with for example parents having to help their children, and children (for example) helping relatives who had inadequate language skills. In the question sessionsomeone noted an increase in people coming along to doctors etc. with a supporting person.
The speaker proposed a neurocognitive strategy to meet the complexity of the situation. The dual processing systems are the declarative (conscious recall, facts and events) memeory system and the procedural (learning by doing, withoiut necessarily learning consciously) memory system. You can plan for (declarative) aural and visual input (which can be tested by asking for oral or text based recall) and (procedural) mimicing, following a process (which can be tested by problem solving tasks). Therefore the speaker was advocating planning for both kinds of input and output, including for information literacy assessment. She felt that using this terminology could also be useful when trying to persuade others to give time for both kinds of teaching. The speaker also felt that combining screenshare, powerpoint etc. was valuable. In terms of assessment, the speaker talked about authentic assessment (e.g. multimedia projects or research papers) or problem based learning.