Department of Pharmacy Practice, University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, 69 North Eagleville Road, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA.
Department of Psychology, Boston College, 300 McGuinn Hall, 140 Commonwealth Ave, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, USA.
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2018 Jun 20;18(1):40. doi: 10.1186/s12911-018-0618-6.
As patients become more engaged in decisions regarding their medical care, they must weigh the potential benefits and harms of different treatments. Patients who are low in numeracy may be at a disadvantage when making these decisions, as low numeracy is correlated with less precise representations of numerical magnitude. The current study looks at the feasibility of improving number representations. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether providing a small amount of feedback to adult subjects could improve performance on a number line placement task and to determine characteristics of those individuals who respond best to this feedback.
Subjects from two outpatient clinic waiting rooms participated in a three phase number line task. Participants were asked to place numbers on a computerized number line ranging from 0 to 1000 in pre-test, feedback, and post-test phases. Generalized estimating equations were used to model log-transformed scores and to test whether 1) performance improved after feedback, and 2) the degree of improvement was associated with age, education level or subjective numeracy.
There was an overall improvement in task performance following the feedback. The average percent absolute error was 7.32% (SD: 6.00) for the pre-test and 5.63% (SD: 3.71) for the post-test. There was a significant interaction between college education and post-test improvement. Only subjects without some college education improved with feedback.
Adults who do not have higher levels of education improve significantly on a number line task when given feedback.
随着患者在医疗决策中的参与度不断提高，他们必须权衡不同治疗方案的潜在收益和风险。在做出这些决策时，计算能力较低的患者可能处于劣势，因为计算能力低与对数值大小的表示不够精确有关。本研究着眼于改善数字表示的可行性。本研究的目的是评估向成年受试者提供少量反馈是否可以提高数线定位任务的表现，并确定对这种反馈反应最佳的个体的特征。
来自两个门诊候诊室的受试者参加了一个三阶段的数线任务。参与者被要求在预测试、反馈和后测试阶段在计算机化的数线（范围从 0 到 1000）上放置数字。广义估计方程用于对数转换分数进行建模，并测试 1）反馈后表现是否有所提高，以及 2）提高的程度是否与年龄、教育水平或主观计算能力相关。
反馈后任务表现整体有所提高。平均绝对误差百分比为预测试的 7.32%（SD：6.00）和后测试的 5.63%（SD：3.71）。大学教育和后测试改善之间存在显著的交互作用。只有没有接受过一些大学教育的受试者才能通过反馈提高。
当给予反馈时，没有接受过更高水平教育的成年人在数线任务上会显著提高。
