Novice driver education model curriculum outline: Summary

By: Lawrence Lonero

Date: Monday, 28. July 2008

Prepared for:
AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety
1440 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 201
Washington, D.C. 20005 202/638-5944

A Message from the sponsor

This study was sponsored by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Founded in 1947, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety is a not-for-profit, publicly supported charitable research and educational organization dedicated to saving lives and reducing injuries by preventing traffic crashes.

Funding for this study was provided by voluntary contributions from motor clubs associated with the American Automobile Association and the Canadian Automobile Association, from individual AAA members, and from AAA affiliated insurance companies.

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety would particularly like to acknowledge the members of its Driver Education Curriculum Outline Research Advisory Task Force, including John W. Archer, AAA Public Policy; Gerald Basch, AAA Michigan; Charles A. Butler, AAA Safety Services; Thomas H. Culpepper, AAA Traffic Safety and Engineering; John L. Harvey, Traffic Safety Education, State of Washington; Frank Kenel, AAA (retired); James McGowan, The Automobile Club of New York; Sue McNeil, Road Safety Educators Association; Donald L. Patton, California State Automobile Association; Michael J. Right, AAA Missouri; Allen Robinson, American Driver and Traffic Safety Education Association; Julie Russell, Centers for Disease Control; Mark Shaw, AAA Ohio Auto Club; Michael F. Smith, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration; John G. Svensson, Driving School Association of Ontario, Inc.; Robert L. Taylor, Alberta Motor Association; and Patricia F. Waller, The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

This publication is distributed by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in the interest of information exchange. The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation or of the members of its Advisory Task Force for this study. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety assumes no liability for its contents or use thereof. If trade or manufacturers' names or products are mentioned, it is only because they are considered essential to the object of the publication and should not be construed as an endorsement. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety does not endorse products or manufacturers.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

CONTENTS

• The state of driver education
• The needs of novice drivers
• Novice driver skills and abilities
• Novice drivers' choices and behavior
• Hazard perception, risk evaluation, and risk acceptance
• Parents/guardians and novice drivers
• Integrating complementary skills and values
• Developing supporting influences for novice drivers
• Graduated licensing
• Strategic directions
• Recommendations

The state of driver education

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has sponsored a project to "reinvent" driver education into a form that reduces crashes by novice drivers. The research team reviewed the current driver education literature in order to identify novice driver needs, evaluate methods of instruction, and assess the effectiveness of driver education in influencing behavior. The researchers then proposed performance objectives for driver education graduates and methods for achieving those objectives.

The main function of current driver education is to support mobility. New drivers need a certain level of skill in order to pass a state or provincial licensing test and satisfy the concerns of their parents or guardians. Driver education helps meet this need. However, the additional need exists to improve the safety performance of novice drivers. When a large-scale study in DeKalb County, Georgia, failed to show a net safety benefit, driver education lost much government support. Although some jurisdictions and suppliers of curriculum materials have continued to develop their programs, in overall terms driver education has declined in the last 15 years.

This paper identifies ways to restructure driver education to realize its potential for improving safety. This new driver education must operate, at least initially, within current resource limitations. It must be modular and flexible to accommodate different programs and a variety of scales, standards, and resources in different jurisdictions. To be widely accepted, curriculum materials should be packaged for easy and straightforward delivery in poorly capitalized, low-tech instructional environments.

The needs of novice drivers

Novice drivers experience serious crash losses far beyond their representation in the driver population or their proportion of mileage driven. As a group they take between five and seven years to reach mature risk levels. However, they vary widely in cultural background, life situation, skills, ability, motivation, level of experience, and crash risk. The difference between male and female behaviors and risks are the best known (although sex differences seem to be diminishing).

The number of novice drivers has been declining for many years, and this has reduced new driver losses. However, this trend will reverse over the rest of the decade as the "baby boom echo" reaches driving age. In addition, economic recession reduces the number of young driver fatalities, so economic recovery may contribute to increased young driver fatalities in the later 1990s. Over the next few years the problem of novice drivers of all ages will take on greater importance.

Novice driver skills and abilities

New drivers lack important skills, particularly those needed to acquire and process information. They are less able to maintain full attention and less likely to take in the information they need from the driving environment. They are not as good as experienced drivers in scanning the environment, recognizing potential hazards while they are still at a safe distance, and making tough decisions quickly. They tend to underestimate the danger of certain risky situations and overestimate the danger in others.

Improved skills alone are not sufficient to ensure new driver safety, however. The safety effects of good driving skills appear to be offset by overconfidence and increased exposure to risk. Better-trained novice drivers become licensed sooner and drive more, in part because of their own increased confidence, but also because their parents often give them more freedom to drive.

Novice drivers' choices and behavior

Crashes are caused by what drivers choose to do as much as by what they are able (or unable) to do. Most of novice drivers' increased risk comes from inappropriate behavior--deliberately taking risky actions, seeking stimulation, driving at high speeds, and driving while impaired. Compared to more experienced drivers, novice drivers more often choose to drive too fast and follow other vehicles too closely. They run yellow lights more, accept smaller gaps in traffic, and allow less room for safety. As a result of their choices, and perhaps because of skill deficiencies as well, they have more rear-end crashes and run-off-the-road crashes than experienced drivers.

Hazard perception, risk evaluation, and risk acceptance

What drivers are able to do and what they choose to do are two different things. Knowledge of how to control a car is not as critical to safety as individual motivation: Strong motivation makes up for weak skills better than strong skills make up for weak motivation. Without strong motivation to reduce risk, advanced skills training can lead to more crashes, not fewer.

Risk acceptance is not the same thing as crash acceptance. Few drivers will take a risky action if they know it will result in a crash. Instead, risky choices result from poor risk perception and inability to detect hazards, often coupled with overconfidence. Good risk detection, good risk evaluation, and strong motivation may support each other. However, if driver education is to produce safer drivers it must reinforce the individual and community factors that positively influence personal motivation and social responsibility.

Parents/guardians and novice drivers

Parents may inadvertently contribute to the failure of driver education to produce safe drivers. They appear to allow driver education graduates more freedom and offer less supervision, exposing new drivers to increased risk. Thus, driver education needs to involve family intervention and must take advantage of the family's strengths in influencing early driving behavior. Parents and guardians need to take a more active and effective role as their children learn to drive. A major challenge for driver education is to discover how to motivate parents to become more realistic about their children's driving, and about the limitations of driver education courses, without turning them off to formal training.

Integrating complementary skills and values

Many different educational fields teach skills, knowledge, and values that are desirable in novice drivers. Driver education objectives are already integrated into other school subjects, such as physics, mathematics, and social studies. New media and teaching techniques can expand the range of this integration. Use of interactive media can enhance attention, improve perception, and hone the decision making skills that apply to many tasks besides driving.

The most critical areas of integration are personal and social values, risk-taking, self esteem, feelings of power, sense of community, and interest in health. These feelings motivate pro-social and self-protective behaviors. Participation in peer group learning activities can help integrate safety-promoting values into all areas of students' lives.

Developing supporting influences for novice drivers

Most new drivers' motivation and responsibility can be enhanced by a sufficiently intense program of education. Peer influences, community education programs, and incentives can all affect novice drivers' behavior. Some new drivers display deviant and problem behaviors; they are likely to be at the highest risk. Community resources must address the special needs of these multi-problem youngsters.

To develop community resources, the driver education industry, school authorities, insurers, governments, families, and communities must decide that they care enough about driver safety to coordinate their efforts. This will require many organizations to cooperate and change.

Graduated licensing

Graduated and provisional licensing systems are likely to be implemented soon in a number of North American jurisdictions. To make such programs effective over the long term, they must be coordinated with driver education. This raises questions of how to organize driver education programs to support new drivers' learning and performance in different graduated licensing systems.

Strategic directions

Demographic and economic trends will lead to an increased market demand for driver education in the coming years. The number of young people is increasing (as are health care costs), and the number and cost of crashes will almost certainly increase concomitantly. With a new, more effective driver education curriculum, issues of standards, governance, and teacher and instructor training will become more important. In addition, the trend towards privatization of driver education will produce new business opportunities for driving schools, suppliers of instructional materials, and instructor trainers. Standards for the compatibility of hardware and software will be needed as technology develops and driver education becomes more complex.

Effective new driver education will be adaptive and experimental. It will stimulate and incorporate rapid advances in knowledge and technology. It will also benefit greatly from advances in interactive learning technology.

Realistic, interactive simulators of the whole driving task are not yet a reality. However, interactive multimedia units and partial task simulators are available, and further development of these types of units is underway. These are the relatively easy parts of the reinvention of driver education, and they will free up resources to concentrate on teaching the "hard parts."

The hard parts include:

1. Devising an effective means of influencing motivation and responsibility;
2. Training and supporting the teachers needed to deliver part 1; and
3. Mobilizing family, community, industry, and government resources to add weight to the influence of parts 1 and 2.

It is unlikely that the necessary coordination will be achieved on a large scale. It may be possible within communities or private, voluntary associations, such as auto club members or groups of insurance company clients.

The new driver education will not be the result of a single, top-down development exercise, nor will there be a single, monolithic curriculum. It will develop in a pluralistic and competitive way, although governments may need to expand their role by setting standards and coordinating efforts. It will include families, communities, and youth groups as well as schools.

The driver education industry must lead the educational and organizational change that is needed if driver education is to become an effective safety intervention.

Recommendations

1. Develop software for teaching and testing knowledge and skills in an individual, self-paced, automated way.
2. Develop interactive multi-media units for training and testing driver attention and visual detection as well as risk perception and evaluation.
3. Develop software based on game-theory models to diagnose, clarify, and reinforce modification of new drivers' risk-taking styles and to demonstrate their consequences.
4. Develop improved in-car instruction and instrumentation to teach driving and perception skills and provide feedback on driver performance.
5. Develop participative classroom units for peer-focused seminars, individual study projects, and group work. These are needed to clarify health and safety values and to enhance personal motivation and social responsibility.
6. Develop instructor training to support the use of new interactive media, participative classroom units, and in-car perception units. The need is to reinvent the teacher and instructor's role, enriching the job by shifting the emphasis from information provider to that of coach or mentor for health and safety motivation, social values, and life skills.
7. Develop tools, models, and instruction units that support parent involvement in young driver education.
8. Develop models and incentives that mobilize community, industry, and government support for coordinating positive influences on novice drivers. These should include links between the driver education and health promotion communities and between driver education and insurance providers.
9. Coordinate development of graduated licensing systems with driver education. Move to multi-stage education in the graduated licensing jurisdictions. These driver education formats should also be pilot tested for effectiveness and market acceptance in non-graduated jurisdictions.
10. Expand the integration of driver education topics into other school subjects, particularly health, community service, and other values-related activities.

The full version of this report can be found on the AAA-FTS web site.

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