Presenter(s)

Oscar A Barnes, Janelle M Debaldo, Phoebe Mularoni, Emily N Panella

Comments

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

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Description

Health literacy can be defined as a person’s ability to both obtain and process health information in order to make decisions regarding their individual health. The purpose of the project was to revise a health document of viruses and bacteria for University of Dayton Intensive English Program (IEP) students. In this research project, our team chose a health document from “Science with Ms. Barton,” which compared bacterial and viral entities. In order to determine the document’s readability level, a SMOG assessment was used, which determined the readability to be 14th grade level for the original document. The team’s goal for the project was to lower that reading level to around 4 in order to make it more accessible to low-literacy students. We met with the IEP students twice in order to receive feedback on the progress of the document’s revision and reformatting. A total of two sessions were held in collaboration with the IEP group. In the first session, we gathered information on the interests of the IEP group pertaining to the topic of “viruses vs. bacteria” and what specific questions they had about it. Next, we revised our draft, reformatted it and wrote a final revised document. On the second visit, we shared the draft with the IEP group to get feedback on its readability. The readability level for the final document was respectively brought down to a 9th grade reading level based on the SMOG assessment and a 4.8 Microsoft Fleschkincaid grade level. In the end, the final revision was made in order to satisfy the group’s literary needs and meet the research team’s goal.

Publication Date

4-5-2017

Project Designation

Course Project - Undergraduate

Primary Advisor

Ann E. Biswas

Primary Advisor's Department

English

Keywords

Stander Symposium project

Comprehension of Comparisons Between Viruses and Bacteria

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