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Promotion of scholarly activities and building nursing research capability are often difficult to translate into the acute care hospital environment. This session illustrates how research can be used to develop nurses' scholarly productivity in the acute care setting and sets the stage for sessions to follow. Health literacy is an issue of increasing importance in the current healthcare environment characterized by shorter lengths of stay and complex treatment. Nurses frequently expressed their concern that level of health literacy was impacting the patient's ability to follow health care instructions, take medications, and return to the home environment. Health literacy was one issue that crossed all patient populations and could be used to coach staff nurses in evidence generation in a variety of patient care settings. Encouraging nurses to undertake the conduct of research required study designs and data collection methods that were feasible for involvement of busy clinicians in an acute care setting. Given limited published research, descriptive research was appropriate to measure the literacy level of served populations. Building on results from early studies, a next step will be conduct of descriptive comparative and quasi-experimental research to better inform nursing practice and expand the body of knowledge about health literacy of patients in the acute care setting. The three studies to date exemplify different stages in development of a health literacy knowledge base. Each stage is built on the knowledge and skills learned in the previous stages. The first to be initiated was a descriptive study with patients experiencing acute psychiatric illness. A replication of that study is underway with oncology patients during acute hospitalization. A third study currently in data collection is a quasi-experimental design testing relative effectiveness of different enhancements to patient education materials for increasing their readability and comprehension for parents of hospitalized children.