DRIVER EDUCATION FOR PRE-TEENS: A NEW APPROACH TOWARD REDUCING CRASHES AMONG YOUNG NOVICE DRIVERS

摘要

This paper reports on a study performed to evaluate the feasibility of educating grade-school age children about road safety. We created a series of integrated classroom programs on topics of speeding, aggressive driving, and sharing the road with bicycles. Lessons, a teacher's guide, and mastery tests were prepared in support of an age-appropriate curriculum that was presented to children (ages 7-9 and 9-11) at five different schools. Using a "before and after with controls" protocol, the experimental groups were taught the road safety curriculum while the control groups received unrelated civics lessons. In general, our hypotheses were confirmed. The extent of the superior achievement on the post-test by experimental groups ranged from 1.4 to more than 5 times that of the control groups. Participant feedback was positive, and lessons were learned to enhance future expansion of the program and its development as an internet-based curriculum.