Educating Teenage Drivers in the Pacific Northwest Regarding the Dangers of Distracted Driving (Phase 1). Final Project Report

摘要

The goal of this outreach project is to examine driver distraction among teenagers including what tasks they consider to be distracting as well as their self reported level of engagement in those same distracting tasks. This study differs from other teenage distracted driving studies in two significant ways; 1) pre-/post-survey responses were collected to assess the influence the interactive presentation has on student participants, and 2) the student sample was collected across a region of the country (the pacific northwest). This research effort addresses the following four objectives: (1) Develop a presentation regarding teenage distrated driving that engages with a variety of student learning styles in an active classroom environment, (2) Administer the presentation to a cross section of teenage high-school students across the Pacific Northwest, (3) Determine existing self reported perspectives of teenage driver perspectives regarding the hazards of distracted driving, and (4) Determine if the newly developed presentation improves those perspectives. In total, almost 1400 teenagers from Corvallis, OR, Seattle, WA, Pullman, WA, and Moscow, ID participated in presentations, and 1006 returned the surveys.