The document contains a comprehensive historical review of the field of driver education, now called driver and traffic safety education, which has been taught in the public schools for more than 30 years. The first of eight chapters traces the early history of safety education from colonial times through the 1940's, including the beginnings of…

Materials intended for driving knowledge test development use by operational licensing and education agencies were prepared. Candidate test items were developed, using literature and operational practice sources, to reflect current state-of-knowledge with respect to principles of safe, efficient driving, to legal regulations, and to traffic…

Describes a study designed to demonstrate that child pedestrian training objectives may be identified systematically through various task analysis methods, making use of different types of empirical information. Early approaches to analysis of pedestrian tasks are reviewed, and an outline of the Traffic Research Centre's pedestrian task analysis…

Describes study conducted in Montreal which used simulation games to determine the effect of role play, group dynamics, behavior modeling, and training on the attitudes and behavior of five-year-old pedestrians with respect to traffic safety rules. Hypotheses tested are presented and treatments for the experimental and control groups are…

Effects of Ohio's mandatory seat belt law on seat belt use, number of car accidents, and number of fatal and severe injuries were evaluated for January 1982 through March 1988. The monthly average number of accident victims was 2,002. Implications for public policy formulation and implementation are discussed. (SLD)

A road safety study was conducted by the University of Salford, Great Britain, in order to evaluate the effects of secondary level driver education in reducing the occurrence of accidents. It examines the feasibility of using accidents and traffic offenses as criteria for evaluating courses in driver education. To achieve this objective, 1,800…

In the United States, 70.8% of all deaths among youth and young adults aged 10-24 years result from only four causes: motor-vehicle crashes (32.3%), other unintentional injuries (11.7%), homicide (15.1%), and suicide (11.7%). Substantial morbidity and social problems also result from the approximately 870,000 pregnancies that occur each year among…

This study examined parental perceptions of the benefits and barriers to bicycle helmet use and their level of knowledge about bicycle safety issues. A school-based bicycle safety education program was taught to first- and second-grade students in a rural/suburban school district by a graduate nursing student. Pender's Health Promotion Model was…

This study concerning the continued heavy drinking rate among Massachusetts college students sought to: (1) determine the specific changes in college drinking since a similar study on the topic was done in 1977; (2) determine the types of problems experienced by heavy drinkers; and (3) search for factors which might account for the continuation of…

This report, the sixteenth in a series of twenty reports undertaken by the Children's Environments Advisory Service for the 1979 International Year of the Child, analyzes the difficulties of designing automobile traffic patterns for areas in which children reside. Automobile traffic and play patterns in 21 multiple-housing projects in the…

The second part of a two-part, two volume study deals with high school youth and identifies target populations and communications strategies for encouraging personal action steps to prevent drunk driving. Data, collected from interviews and questionnaires, are summarized and presented in tabular form. One fourth of high schoolers in a…

The Scottish Road Safety Campaign and the Road Safety Council of Wales have made a large investment in theater tours as a method of providing road safety education. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a road safety message delivered by a theater group, Road Safety Officers (RSOs), or, teachers for pupils in upper secondary classes.…

A series of five national instructor training institutes were planned for each of three emerging highway safety technician areas for which curriculum packages have been prepared (Driver Improvement Analysis, Driver License Examiner-Supervisor, and Traffic Record Analysis). Technical Education Research Centers and Dunlap & Associates…

Reports a survey that documented the health and safety behaviors of parents of children in Head Start programs. Nearly all parents reported using car seats, teaching handwashing and pedestrian safety, and locking away medicine and alcohol. Sixty percent reported storing guns and bullets safely, possessing working fire extinguishers, and having…

Most adolescent deaths are caused by injury sustained in traffic crashes, and driver education does not necessarily reduce the problem. This multi-method, ethnographic study describes the logic and regulation of youth driving culture in a northern Ontario community. This included 40 hours of participant observation and a survey of 88 novice…