Knowledge and diabetes self-management

The Starr County Diabetes Education Study

“…Research has demonstrated that knowledge about medications, diet, exercise, home glucose monitoring, foot care, and treatment modifications is necessary to effectively selfmanage diabetes (6)(7)(8)(9). Although knowledge alone does not guarantee requisite behavior modifications or effective self-management (10,11), the assessment of diabetes-related knowledge is an important first step from which to individualize diabetes education programs and make evaluations of their effectiveness (12).…”

The relationship between health literacy and knowledge improvement after a multimedia type 2 diabetes education program

“…Using the same data set as above, we regressed the full S-TOFHLA score on the reading comprehension score. We then applied the previously published cutoffs for the full S-TOFHLA categories of inadequate (0-53), marginal (54-66), and adequate (67-100) to determine corresponding categories for the reading comprehension scores alone, which were: ''inadequate'' (0-16), ''marginal'' (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22) and ''adequate'' (23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36). The Spearman correlation coefficient between the categories for the full S-TOFHLA and the categories for the reading comprehension passages was 0.93, and the agreement between the two methods was 91% (i.e., 9% of people were classified differently by using just the reading comprehension passages.…”

“…MDEPs have the potential to improve communication and education of those with low health literacy, but few studies have examined the relationship between health literacy and the amount of new information learned after viewing a MDEP [3]. While it is recognized that knowledge does not always predict behavior change or glycemic control [17], health behavior theories generally include basic knowledge as a necessary element of health behavior change and outcomes [18]. In this study, we examined the effect of a MDEP targeted to patients with low literacy on knowledge improvement and assessed the association between literacy and knowledge improvement.…”

The use of degrees of certainty to evaluate knowledge

“…So far the degree of certainty has been used to analyse the quality of knowledge of university students or professionals, but has rarely been used with patients. It is however clear that patients hesitate to use correct knowledge about which Patient Education and Counseling 51 (2003) [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] they feel unsure, while are ready to use wrong notions held for true with a high degree of certainty [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. For this reason, educational programmes should be designed not only to increase correct knowledge, but also to make a better match between certainty and correctness.…”