During my spring 2012 internship, I took on a variety of projects at NN/LM PSR. One of these projects included making modifications to the existing ‘Helping Older Adults Search for Health Information Online: A Toolkit for Trainers’ (http://nihseniorhealth.gov/toolkit/toolkit.html) to create a toolkit targeting adults, especially those with low literacy skills.

Medical information is often dense, complex, and filled with jargon. Readers of all literacy levels benefit from straightforward, plain language and easy-to-read health information. But this course will be focused mostly on helping individuals with below basic and basic literacy levels seek out health information online. The ultimate goal of the course is to help individuals to locate accurate and authoritative health information which will lead them to make better decisions regarding their own health, resulting in changes in behavior and their whole well-being.

The end result will be an Internet training program to help adults with low literacy find answers to their health questions. Just like its predecessor, it will be a free, downloadable Toolkit for Trainers that accomplishes three valuable goals; teach computer skills to beginners, introduce adults to high quality, easy-to-understand online health information, and help them build Internet search and evaluation skills at the same time.

See on nnlm.gov