Use of an eBook for Oral Health Literacy© Curriculum to Elicit Functional Health Knowledge, Decision Making, and Goal Setting Among School-Aged Children

Abstract

An eBook for Oral Health Literacy© curriculum was used as a brief intervention to help school-aged children use their functional health literacy skills of reading, writing, and speaking to learn about oral health hygiene and the importance of choosing healthy food and beverages for their teeth. The curriculum focused on building functional knowledge about oral health hygiene and nutrition behaviors through a health literacy intervention that highlighted the need for reasoned actions when setting food goals for healthy teeth and making decisions to keep teeth healthy and strong. The aims of the study included: 1) determining what children learned about their teeth from two chapters of the eBook for Oral Health Literacy© curriculum and what they remembered from reading the oral health and nutrition stories; 2) determining whether children liked to read and what they liked about the words and the pictures of the stories, and; 3) determining whether children brushed their teeth in the morning and at night; had any cavities; had teeth or mouth pain; and visited the dentist every six months for a dental checkup. The visual textual narrative helped children to build a vocabulary about oral health when reading and writing about health. Children wrote about words and phrases that they recalled after reading each chapter. Their elaborations exemplified the importance of using a constructivist theoretical framework to elicit children’s functional health knowledge about oral health and nutrition. Chi-square results showed that there was a moderate significant correlation between children who reported brushing their teeth in the morning and having been to the dentist in the past year (p = .021).