To access our Electronic Texts for Health Literacy©, click on the three collections above: Children, Youth, or Adults.

Curriculum Assumptions:

Health education is a social and behavioral science that communicates how individuals and groups of people can build cognitive-behavioral skills through continual practice. Cognitive-behavioral skills outlined by the Habits of Health and Habits of Mind Model (Ubbes, 2008) support learners across the lifespan to recognize the relationship between their health habits and quality of life. Many of our Electronic Texts for Health© use one Habit of Health (behaviors) and one Habit of Mind (cognitive skills) to model how people can be healthy.

Our collection of Electronic Texts for Health Literacy© have several themes (Ubbes, 2014) woven through their design:

1. body language showing how human actions are described visually and named textually by its referent body part or human senses rather than assuming that an action “just happened” in the background via the body and brain during life experiences;
2. written language showing how the author writes a personal health narrative in pictures and in words while using English (and sometimes, in at least one other language), and
3. oral language showing how health is talked about as an interactive literacy between a reader and one other person or groups of people – acknowledging that meaning making and comprehension is socially constructed.

By also aligning Electronic Texts for Health Literacy© to the National Health Education Standards at the end of the design process, health and education professionals can advance “what students should know and be able to do” through Performance Indicators. You will find these developmentally appropriate Performance Indicators at the end of many of our Electronic Texts for Health Literacy©. We purposely chose the National Health Education Standards because they “provide a framework for teachers, administrators, and policy makers in designing or selecting curricula, allocating instructional resources, and assessing student achievement and progress” (U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2020).

We hope you enjoy our collection and come back often to see our new materials that are uploaded twice a year at the end of our academic semesters.

References:

Ubbes, V.A. (2008). Educating for health: An inquiry-based approach to preK-8 pedagogy. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Ubbes, V.A. (2014). Health Literacy Database at Miami University. Available at http://dlp.lib.miamioh.edu/healthliteracy.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (2020). The National Health Education Standards. Available at www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/sher/standards/index.htm