Readability and beyond - Health literacy and numeracy and COVID-19 communications in early childhood education: Are we communicating effectively?

Objective: Analyse the linguistic and numerical complexity of COVID-19-related health information communicated from Australian national and state governments and health agencies to national and local early childhood education (ECE) settings.

Methods: Publicly available health information (n = 630) was collected from Australian national and state governments and health agencies, and ECE agencies and service providers. A purposive sample of documents (n = 33) from 2020 to 2021 was analysed inductively and deductively combining readability, health numeracy and linguistic analyses and focusing on the most frequent actionable health advice topics.

Results: COVID-19 health advice most frequently related to hygiene, distancing and exclusion. Readability scores in 79% (n = 23) of documents were above the recommended grade 6 reading level for the public. Advice was delivered using direct linguistic strategies (n = 288), indirect strategies (n = 73), and frequent mitigating hedges (n = 142). Most numerical concepts were relatively simple, but lacked elaborative features (e.g., analogies) and/or required subjective interpretation.

Conclusion: COVID-19 health advice available to the ECE sector included linguistic and numerical information open to mis/interpretation making it difficult to understand and implement.

Practice implications: Combining readability scores with measures of linguistic and numerical complexity offers a more holistic approach to assessing accessibility of health advice and improving health literacy among its recipients.