Finding Physicians Fast: Making finding a doctor easier for ESL students

Authors

Presenter(s)

Katherine J. Gross, Marissa Christine Jama, Charles Conner Yancey

Comments

This poster reflects research conducted as part of a course project designed to give students experience in the research process.

Files

Description

In the realm of healthcare, it is often difficult to decipher how to locate personal and primary physicians. Those living in the United States are familiar with the role of family care physicians, however, individuals who have immigrated to the U.S. may not fully understand how to find a family physician. The topic of family physicians is important because many other countries do not have primary care physicians that require appointments. For our project, we took two documents that tested at a reading level of 12th grade. We did this by testing the original documents with the SMOG test and the Flesch-Kincaid Test. The SMOG test was performed manually and evaluated the documents’ sentence structure and individual word syllables. The Flesch-Kincaid Test was performed via the program Word and measured the documents’ average reading level. We then presented this document to students in the Level 2 Intensive English Program (IEP) at the University of Dayton to gauge how readable our revised document was. In addition to lowering the level of the vocabulary, we provided the students with a visual step-by-step guide outlining the process of finding a family physician in America. The processes included routes that the individual can take to find a physician if they do possess health insurance or if they do not possess health insurance. Through several meetings with the IEP students we were able to obtain feedback as to how to improve the quality of our document. By lowering the readability level of our documents to a 6th grade level, we made the information of locating a primary care physician in the Dayton area to these students.

Publication Date

4-9-2016

Project Designation

Course Project

Primary Advisor

Ann E. Biswas

Primary Advisor's Department

English

Keywords

Stander Symposium project

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Business | Education | Engineering | Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences | Physical Sciences and Mathematics | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Recommended Citation

"Finding Physicians Fast: Making finding a doctor easier for ESL students" (2016). Stander Symposium Projects. 733.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/733