The dilemma of what to teach
By: Dan Keegan
Date: 1994-09-09
Shortly after midnight not long ago, six young people climbed into a station wagon and left a party in a small rural area. One was dropped off not far from the party and the other five continued along the winding country road.
With its dips, curves, and hills, the road was not one for speed. There was no safe place for passing. The station wagon carrying the five youths came up fast behind another car, then tailgated so closely that the car's occupants thought it would hit the back bumper.
Inexplicably, the driver of the station wagon pulled out to pass just at the crest of a hill. The driver of a third car coming the other way probably didn't have a chance. In addition to the youths in the station wagon, three of the five occupants in the other car were killed.
The crash was a classic case of all the risks associated with teen-driving tragedies--late at night, a crowded car, possible drinking (beer bottles were found in the wreckage), and poor judgment. The huge media response and the calls for tougher regulation and more education were predictable.
Whether graduated licensing, now being introduced in many jurisdictions, will reduce the risk faced by novice drivers has been widely discussed. Even more debatable is the effectiveness of driver education as a countermeasure. The great variety in approaches to training and educating drivers around the world testifies to the uncertainty about what training can do and how best to do it. Few jurisdictions have mandatory programs. In many countries, nothing more than a very simple quiz on the rules and a 10 to 15-minute road test stand between a license applicant and full driving privileges.
At the other extreme. Germany prohibits new drivers from practicing even with parents or friends until they've received instruction from a highly-trained professional. Underlying the many approaches is the fact that we really don't know what training and education can accomplish.
The most comprehensive study undertaken was initiated by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1978, involving 16,000 high school students in De Kalb County, Georgia. The students were divided into a control group, a group that got the standard 30-hour "Pre-Driver Licensing" (PDL) training traditionally offered in U.S. high schools, and a third group that received a special, enhanced "Safe Performance Curriculum" (SPC) of about 80 hours.
The study provided no evidence for driver education. In an interesting twist, the more highly-trained SPC students actually had slightly more crashes than the PDL group. One explanation was that the more polished driving of the SPC group gave them more access to the family car and more opportunity to crash. According to Dr. Jack Weaver, the study's director, follow-up research seemed to bear this out.
In the aftermath of the De Kalb study, support for driver education declined and funding for school programs withered. The flow of energy and ideas also dried up, many programs continued purely on inertia and quality plummeted. The driver-training and education community never accepted the study as a valid test.
The commercial-training community was particularly critical, pointing out that the type of programs tested in De Kalb typically offered a mere four to six hours of in-car training. The good news was that the study forced a complete re-evaluation of what driver education is all about. One prominent researcher, Patricia Waller, of the University of Michigan, questions whether driver education is understood at all. She opposed the De Kalb study in the first place, believing that the criteria for evaluating safe driving were based on opinion, not research. "An opinion survey among instructors and other professionals in the field decided what concepts programs would teach, rather than any basis of human factors research," she says. More and more voices have been added to the call for basic research into the specifics of training and educating drivers.
Dr. Mike Smith, of NHTSA has taken a keen interest in the De Kalb study and its aftermath. He believes the problem is more a matter of how driver training and education are presented rather than what's presented. He doesn't see further research revealing anything dramatically new or different to teach. It's more a question of timing than anything else, he feels. Trying to teach novices everything at once, before they get a license, isn't effective because they simply can't absorb the information.
"When the teacup is full," he says, "there's no point in pouring more into it."
"We need a minimum of two different levels of training," says Smith. "The initial level would teach basic vehicle handling and control skills. After that, novices need to gain experience in basic vehicle handling. Then, I would bring them back and give them safe-driving information, teach appropriate decision-making skills, reduced risk taking and so on, both in the classroom and behind the wheel."
Smith sees some kind of graduated licensing as the structure in which to set these instructional levels. The need to redesign how we educate drivers is now obvious. The challenge is what form the redesign should take.
Canada's Alberta Motor Association tackled this problem at a 1993 conference on developing a curriculum for novice drivers. A multidisciplinary group representing traffic safety research, education, sociology, psychology, health communication, media, design, and technology spent two days at the University of Alberta pondering the issue.
The participants generally agreed that the constellation of attitudes and behaviors typically associated with youth in particular could not be dealt with in a one-shot education experience. As well as basic training, educators somehow need to effectively address risk perceptions, attitudes and values.
Dr. Christian Heinrich, of the German Federal Highway Research Institute's Driver Behavior Branch, and Canadian traffic sociologist J. Peter Rothe explained that the traffic and social environments both play a vital role determining how after-licensing experiences shape driver behavior.
According to Heinrich, as drivers experience their driving environment, they may make wrong assumptions about risk based on what they get away with. Guidance in the early stages can alert them to these wrong assumptions. Rothe pointed out that social risks often outrank driving risks when drivers make decisions - for example, teens who decide that the immediate consequence of calling home to tell a parent they're too impaired to drive outweighs the more remote risk of having a crash or being caught. Educational interventions, said Rothe, must deal with these social considerations.
At the Alberta conference, the idea of a one-shot curriculum exploded into a multiplicity of new questions about what should be taught, the kinds of educational experiences needed, and the most effective media.
These, then, are the challenges that lie ahead for the training and education community. Basic training should be redesigned according to more realistic expectations of outcomes. Follow-up education should include issue-oriented, discussion-type forums that are far more likely than lectures to alter the type of perceptions that lead to tragedies like the crash described at the beginning of this article.
As John Palmer, Chair of Traffic safety and Health Sciences at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, pointed out to participants at the Alberta conference, properly directed discussion forums often dispel the myths teenagers have about their how their peers feel about risk behavior.
What is emerging from all the discussion is that the driver training and education community must offer a more diverse range of capabilities. The instructor who teaches the beginner the basics of operating a car in traffic will be only one link in the chain. The rest of the chain must include traffic education in kindergarten, bicycle education, post-licensing training, and programs that branch out to health, socialization, law, and civic responsibility.
Comments to this article have been disabled.
