New articles and reports: digital literacy in schools; information literacy needs of graduate students; health literacy estimates

Polizzi, G. and Taylor, R. (2019) Misinformation, digital literacy and the school curriculum. Media Policy briefs (22). London School of Economics and Political Science. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/101083/ (open access). This is a useful summary of related recent UK policy developments and has "a non-exhaustive list of organisations, ordered alphabetically, that provide teaching resources on aspects related to textual analysis and evaluation, media representation, misinformation, the media and the internet".
It is advocating a focus on digital literacy and it is more than disappointing that libraries are only mentioned when the authors are quoting others (apart from a mention in passing of The British Library).

Zhao, S. (2019). A Study of Graduate Students’ Information Literacy Needs in the Electronic Resource Environment. PhD thesis, University of Windsor, Canada. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/7747/ (open access) "This study examines the information literacy skills of graduate students at the University of Windsor. The study encompassed a quantitative survey questionnaire administered to 137 graduate students and a qualitative component that involved semi-structured, open-ended focus groups with 17 graduate students. ... This study demonstrates that participating graduate students had only a basic understanding of information literacy skills—significantly less than the level required by the Association of College & Research Libraries. They need more information literacy training, potentially through an information literacy credit course or through intensive one-on-one instruction. Particularly, increasing the collaboration between libraries and faculties to integrate effective library-led information literacy into graduate course instruction would greatly benefit graduate students’ research and overall academic success."

Zawilinski, L. L., Kirkpatrick, H., Pawlaczyck, B., & Yarlagadda, H. (2019). Actual and perceived patient health literacy: How accurate are residents’ predictions? The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. (early online publication) https://doi.org/10.1177/0091217419860356 "The purpose of this study is to replicate and extend the findings of previous research by examining residents’ ability to predict health literacy levels in patients and to use a newer validated measure of health literacy. A total of 38 patient encounters were included in this study. Patients were administered the Health Literacy Skills Instrument-Short Form to assess health literacy levels. Twenty resident physicians conducted visits with study participants and were asked to predict the health literacy of their patients. ..... residents accurately identified about 60% of patients with good health literacy; 40% of the time they overestimated the patient’s actual ability to comprehend health information. Conversely, in slightly more than half of visits (53%) where the patient had inadequate levels of health literacy, our resident physicians’ judgments were accurate. This would seem to indicate that physicians may need coaching regarding which patients might need modifications of education or management delivery plans to improve patient understanding."
Photo by Sheila Webber: these cherries tasted nice, July 2019