Background and proposed project

Recent trends in medical decision-making and patient self-management increasingly call for patients to use quantitative skills and concepts to navigate healthcare situations effectively. The sound application of mathematical skills in practical, everyday contexts is often referred to as numeracy or quantitative literacy. In response to these developments in healthcare, researchers and clinicians have initiated efforts to define and investigate health numeracy, in order to measure relevant skills among patients, design effective tools to educate and communicate with patients on various numeracy levels, and consider interventions for improving numeracy within a healthcare context. Though a few health numeracy scales have been developed in recent years, none have been extensively validated or explicitly based on wider theoretical discussions of numeracy. This project proposes to synthesize and build on work done to define and assess numeracy both in healthcare research and in a broader mathematics education context. Specifically, we propose to develop, test, and validate a tool that will

• Describe patients’ level of health numeracy reliably and accurately;
• Predict important health outcomes;
• Evaluate interventions targeting numeracy; and
• Identify correlates and predictors of health numeracy.

Preliminary Publications

1. An Item Response Theory Analysis of the Numeracy Questionnaire