Selecting appropriate course materials for a contemporary health issues course is a challenging task because the existing textbooks are not able to address constantly changing contemporary health issues. This study explored the value of using newspaper articles from the New York Times (NYT) in teaching contemporary health issues. In Spring 2004, the NYT was used as one of the two required texts for a senior undergraduate contemporary health issues course at a large university in southeast US. Students enrolled in the course were required to read all health related articles Monday through Friday in the NYT and actively participate in the bi-weekly class discussion. Each student was assigned to lead a 20-minute class discussion once during the semester based on his/her analyses of the health issues appearing in two days of the NYT prior to the class meeting. Not only did the NYT provide broad coverage and in-depth discussions of various contemporary health issues, other significant benefits resulted from reading the NYT as reflected in students’ responses to a 15-item anonymous survey (alpha=0.58) administered at the end of Spring 2004. Although the sample size was small (n=23), the survey revealed positive results. As compared to their previous newspaper reading habits, students significantly increased the number of days reading newspapers from an average of 1-2 days/week to 3-5 days/week (t=5.03, p<.0001), significantly more students read health/medicine news (t=4.90, p<.0001), science and technology (t=5.85, p<.0001), international news (t=3.76, p<.01), national and local news (t=2.30, p<.05), business/financial news (t=2.47, p<.05), and editorial/opinion articles (t=2.15, p<.05). The majority of the students believed that reading the NYT regularly had enriched their knowledge of current events and issues (91%), increased their knowledge of national and international news (83%), increased their knowledge of local events (70%), improved their communications skills (reading, writing, vocabulary) (65%), increased their participation in class discussions (61%), and improved their critical thinking skills (52%).
This exploratory study indicates that NYT is a valuable text for an undergraduate contemporary health issues course. Requiring students to read NYT daily seems to have improved students’ newspaper reading habits, helped the students to connect the classroom to the real world, and improved their writing, speaking and critical thinking skills. Future studies need to use a larger sample of undergraduate and graduate students to examine the validity of using NYT as a required text for undergraduate and graduate contemporary health issues course.