Driving educators should look to research
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 1996-09-09
Driving instructors give their students advice about setting their mirrors a certain way, scanning the rearview mirror every 5 to 8 seconds as they drive along, following at a two-second distance, or braking in a certain way. But is that advice based on hard research that links these techniques to increased safety, or is it opinion based on expert drivers' feelings about what makes safer driving?
When leading traffic safety researcher Herb Simpson told driving school owners to "re-evaluate everything they do" several years ago at a conference in Toronto, he meant it quite literally. For a number of years prominent researchers, such as Professor Patricia Waller and Dr. Simpson, have been saying that most of the stuff of driver training and education curriculum, the concepts and skills taught every day by driver education instructors across the continent, have little or no foundation in empirical research. In other words there's little, if any, evidence that teaching particular concepts or skills reduces the tendency of drivers to have a crash during their subsequent driving career.
These are very tough words, since their implications for future support for training and education are far-reaching. However, they have their origins in the fact that, in many instances, today's driver educators base their teachings on opinion about what leads to safer driving rather than on empirically based fact.
Driver education curriculum today is largely based on a major study of the driving task published in 1970. The study, carried out by the now-defunct Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO), analyzed the driving task and identified critical elements that should be taught by driver educators. But the study was based on a survey of expert opinion rather than actual empirical research, says Professor Waller, who now heads the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
A leading question for driver educators now is whether curriculum that evolved from the HumRRO Task Analysis fails because there's something wrong with what's taught, or because--as another prominent researcher suggests--the mode of delivery is inappropriate.
Dr. Mike Smith, a senior researcher with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Office of Program Development and Evaluation, believes that the latter consideration plays a big part. Smith proposes that one of the most important questions driver educators must deal with is the "when" of driver education delivery rather than the "what."
Detailed research into what works and what doesn't needs to be carried out, Smith says, but he believes that current methods of delivery are inappropriate and that this may be largely responsible for the ineffectiveness of present-day programs.
It's not possible for novice drivers to learn everything they need to know in a short time, Smith feels. The learning needs to be spread out over a much longer time period and tailored to each driver's abilities.
Recently, the NHTSA announced that it supports a two-phase delivery system for driver training/education, and it also supports a system of graduated licensing for novice drivers that would be integrated with, and facilitate, a two-phase system.
Where does that leave driver educators? The obvious need to question and re-evaluate the content of today's in-car and classroom lessons is leading driver educators to take a more challenging stance towards the research community. This stance is supported by Herb Simpson. The research community, he says, has criticized the training industry for building programs by the seat of their pants.
"But if the training industry challenged the research community and said, 'We'd love to build programs based on facts, but what are the facts?' I think they'd run for the hills. A lot of what they're saying in terms of the research they have is bluff."
Just exactly where the research world stands on the matter of empirical evidence about various elements of the driving task related to risk is the subject of a major study recently completed by the Canadian Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) under Dr. Simpson's direction.
The study, titled "The Role of Driving Experience," was carried out for the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) as a follow-up to its New to The Road study, which was completed in 1991 and laid the foundations for the system of graduated driver licensing just introduced in the province of Ontario. See another Drivers.com article entitled " Canadian insurer's position on driver training " which describes the study in more detail.
"I believe that the research community has created a myth that if driver educators would pay attention they would have effective programing," says Simpson. But the Role of Driving Experience study, which has reviewed about 250 research reports as well as all of the expert opinion, will, he believes, reveal that research efforts so far have been rather chaotic.
This is not to say, he adds, that there isn't some good information about important psychomotor skills, perceptual differences, differences in cognitive processes, and so on. The report will point out this work. But the results are not cut and dried and there's an important need to map out a strategy for research that will fill in the gaps.
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