Numeracy Education for Health Care Providers: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Health numeracy (numerical literacy) refers to an individual's ability to use numerical information to make effective health decisions. Numeracy is fundamental in the role of a health care provider, forming the basis of evidence-based medicine and effective patient-provider communication. Despite a high level of education, many health care providers struggle with numeracy. Numeracy is often integrated into training curricula; however, teaching modality, competencies covered, learner satisfaction, and effectiveness of these educational interventions varies. METHOD: A scoping review was conducted to explore and summarize what is known about numeracy skills education programs for health care providers. A comprehensive literature search was conducted from January 2010 to April 2021 in 10 databases. Controlled vocabulary terms and text words were used. The search was restricted to human studies, adults, and the English language. Articles were included if they were related to numeracy education for health care providers or trainees and provided details regarding methods, evaluation, and results. RESULTS: The literature search retrieved 31,611 results and 71 met the inclusion criteria. Most interventions were conducted in a university setting, and targeted nursing students, medical students, resident physicians, and pharmacy students. Common numeracy concepts included statistics/biostatistics, medication calculations, evidence-based medicine, research methodology, and epidemiology. A variety of teaching modalities were used, which most often combined active approaches (eg, workshops, laboratories, small-group exercises, and discussion boards) with passive approaches (eg, traditional lectures and didactic teaching). Measured outcomes included knowledge and skills, self-efficacy, attitudes, and engagement. DISCUSSION: Although efforts have been made to incorporate numeracy into training curricula, greater emphasis should be placed on developing strong numeracy skills in health care providers, particularly given the role numerical information plays in clinical decision making, evidence-based practices, and patient-provider communication.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.024 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".