Development Curriculum and Evaluation Strategies to Incorporate Health Literacy into the Lives of Elementary School Children in Maryland

Health literacy is the ability to find, understand and use health information to make healthy decisions. Nearly half of all Americans have difficulty understanding and acting on health information. This impacts short and long term health outcomes.  One community in Maryland wanted to address the low health literacy among their low-income rural population and decided to start with the children. A collaborative partnership was created between a university, a health care system and a public school system to develop health literacy standards for integrated public school general curriculum. The draft standards were shared with elementary school teachers, who were trained in health literacy and asked to create pilot curriculum about health literacy concepts integrated with reading, writing, science and social studies. We conducted a pilot evaluation with second graders pre- and post-curriculum implementation, and found improved health literacy scores among students. We will describe the development of health literacy standards, teacher training, integrated curriculum, and evaluation strategies. Also, the results will be presented to show the impact of health literacy curriculum on second graders. The curriculum is now being implemented county-wide and has been broadened to include first, third, fourth and fifth grade classes across the county.