ENG 574: Why People Don't Learn from Diabetes Literature: Influence of Text and Reader Characteristics - Sarah Felicelli

Reid, John C., David M. Klachko, Carol Anne M. Kardash, Richard D. Robinson, Robbie Scholes, and Delbert Howard. 1995. “Why People Don’t Learn from Diabetes Literature: Influence of Text and Reader Characteristics.” Patient Education and Counseling. 25: 31-38.

This article introduces a study examining how well patients were able to recall information from selected diabetes literature. The researchers recruited 26 diabetes patients to participate in the study. The patients took a pre-test to determine their level of knowledge about diabetes, a vocabulary test and a test to rank their desire for learning new information. Following these three initial tests, the patients read an excerpt from a commonly used diabetes pamphlet. Then, the participants were asked to tell researchers what information they recalled from the excerpt and to pick out the top ten sentences in the document (those that the participants viewed as the most important to remember). The researchers then compared the participants top ten list to that of diabetes doctors who had ranked their top ten sentences from the document as well. The researchers found that the participants were only able to recall 7% of the text of the document and that there was not a strong correlation between level of prior knowledge and recall of information. They did, however, find that those people who had a higher desire to learn new things had a higher level of recall of the text.

The researchers used a convenience sample of diabetes patients, so the sample of the study was rather small. If they were to repeat this study, it would be useful to expand the study to those who are not directly affected by diabetes to determine whether there is a difference in results. In addition, it would have been interesting to create different versions of the same text to determine whether syntax or semantics had an effect on the ability of participants to recall information. Despite these issues with the study, the article provides information that is beneficial to technical writers and editors. I have chosen to include this article in my final research project because it directly relates to my topic. The researchers examined the text using the recommendations from "The Science of Scientific Writing" by Gopen and Swan (1990) (see previous post on 2/13/11), and I will be conducting a similar study. Overall, this was an extremely useful article for my research.