Reinventing driver education

By: Lawrence P. Lonero

Date: Sunday, 28. January 2007

Larry Lonero is an expert on crash causes and a principal of Northport Associates, a consulting company based in Ontario, Canada.

Summary

By the early 1990s, it was clear that driver education in North America, typically provided in public secondary schools, was declining. This was due at least in part to disappointment with the findings of the landmark DeKalb study, which was a controlled clinical trial of a new, state-of-the-art high-school driver education program. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, D.C. identified a need and sponsored a project to "reinvent" a more effective approach to driver education for the U.S. and Canada. Both countries were facing a rapid increase in the young driver population, after years of decline, due to the "baby boom" echo. The comprehensive review and needs identification project was carried out by Northport Associates based in Ontario, Canada. The resulting report outlines a more comprehensive set of driver characteristics and instructional approaches than had typically been addressed by driver education previously. For effective and lasting crash prevention, the report concluded that both skill and motivational aspects of driver development must be addressed effectively. That is, to produce a net reduction in traffic crashes among its graduates (relative to those receiving only informal training) driver education must be structured as both an education/training program and a behavior change intervention. To succeed in achieving such a mandate would require that driver education: 1) develop and adopt new instructional approaches; 2) move to an extended, multi-stage format; and 3) be supported by coordinated, ongoing behavioral influences in families, communities, and states. This mandate was very ambitious and remains far from general achievement, but promising progress has been made in some areas, particularly in computer-based training. Unfortunately, other identified needs, such as organizational change and advanced classroom instructional methods directed toward motivation have lagged.

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The state of driver education

The intent of the project was to identify the areas of change needed to give driver education a positive safety impact. At the present time, supporting mobility is the main function of formal driver education (DE). New drivers need to learn the skills to handle a vehicle and interact with other road users well enough to pass a licensing test and satisfy the safety concerns of parents/guardians. Driver education helps meet these needs. While this is a valuable service, there has always been a desire for DE to help novice drivers perform more safely. The DeKalb County study was a major experimental field trial of the safety impact of a specially developed, intensive DE program. When it failed to show a net safety benefit, much support for DE in North America was lost in the 1980s. Some jurisdictions and private organizations continued to develop their programs, but overall DE suffered a decline of support after the DeKalb report. By the 1990s, it was widely recognized that a renewal of DE is needed (e.g., Mayhew & Simpson, 1997; Young, 1993).

Drivers' needs, system needs

Novice drivers contribute to serious crash losses well beyond their representation in the driving population or mileage driven (Williams, 1995). As a group, new drivers take five to seven years to reach mature risk levels. However, they are also a diverse group, varying widely in cultural background, life situations, skills, underlying abilities, motivations, levels of experience, and crash risk. Male/female differences in behavior and risk are best known, but sex differences seem to be declining.

Conventional safety education can readily facilitate cognitive and psychomotor learning, but lasting influence over behavior is much harder to accomplish. As well as in road safety, behavior change is a major challenge for all the safety, health, and other helping sciences (Lonero & Clinton, 1998). The classical education model of DE is inadequate, and fundamental changes in content, methods, and organization are clearly needed. Because it is expected to actually change behavior, DE has a tougher job than most other forms of education. To have a chance of succeeding, DE must lead in the scope and precision of its content and the effectiveness of its methods. Innovative, participational education in the classroom and self-paced, automated training in the lab are needed to balance motives and skills. Reduction of crashes will also likely require linking DE with parental and community influences, graduated licensing, and motivational influences such as personal involvement and incentives (see Geller et al., 1990; Lonero et al., 1995a).

From the perspective of 1995, when the Novice Driver Education Model Curriculum Outline was developed, it was clear that a reinvented DE would have to operate initially within severe resource limitations. Curriculum hardware and software need to be highly developed and simply packaged for delivery in poorly capitalized, low-tech instructional environments. Starting in the 1990s, both for-profit and non-profit private organizations started bringing new capital into the field, and this opened new opportunities for future development. Nevertheless, a new DE will have to be modular and highly flexible to accommodate the severe non-uniformity of standards, organization, and available resources in different jurisdictions. The late 1990s brought trends toward consolidation of the driving school industry and organizational integration with insurance and automobile manufacturing. These trends seemed to promise better organization and more development resources, but it is not yet clear how successful the early consolidators and integrators have been and whether others will follow.

Skills vs. motives

Novice drivers as a group have important skill deficiencies, particularly in acquiring and processing information from the driving environment. They are less able to integrate the required psychomotor skills. They are less able to control attention and to extract the full richness of information available in the environment. They are less effective in scanning the environment, in detecting and recognizing hazards at a safe distance, and in making tough decisions quickly. Compared to experienced drivers, they underestimate the danger in some relatively risky situations, and they overestimate the danger in some less risky situations (Mayhew & Simpson, 1995).

Improving novice drivers' skills may be necessary for improved safety, but it is clearly not sufficient. Novices' excess crash risk is quite situation dependant. They are at especially high risk on recreational trips at night and when carrying teenage passengers. They are quite safe when driving under supervision and when on purposeful trips (Preusser, Ferguson, & Williams, 1997), which suggests that fundamental skill deficits are not the most important factors in their excess risk.

Crashes on the road result from what drivers choose to do, at least as much as from what they are able (or unable) to do. A major portion of risk results from risk acceptance in various forms--deliberate risky actions, stimulus seeking, high speeds, and impaired driving. Compared to older, experienced drivers, young and novice drivers choose to drive too fast, too close to other vehicles. As a result they have more rear-end crashes and run-off-the-road crashes. They run yellow lights more, accept smaller gaps in traffic, and leave smaller safety margins.

The safety potential of improving drivers' skill, so far at least, appears to be offset by overconfidence and increased exposure to risk. Better-trained novice drivers become licensed sooner and drive more, perhaps in part at least because of their own overconfidence and that of their parents, who give them more freedom to drive.

The Safe Performance Curriculum, developed for the DeKalb study, focused strongly on skill development, reversing an earlier (and apparently ineffective) emphasis on motivation through scare tactics. The results of advanced skills training, such as skid schools, have also shown that higher skills can lead to more crashes, not fewer (Glad, 1988; Jones, 1993; OECD, 1990; Siegrist & Ramsier, 1992). A skid control study with young drivers showed an increase in confidence without any real increase in skill (Gregerson, 1996).

Nevertheless, risk acceptance is not the same as crash acceptance--few drivers would take a risky action if they knew it was going to result in a crash. Deficiencies in motor skills, attention management, risk perception and hazard detection skills, and overconfidence in these and other skills, will also contribute to risky choices. There may be a mutually supportive effect of stronger motivation and better risk detection and evaluation skills. However, enhancing the individual and community factors that influence novice drivers' personal motivation and social responsibility have to be the highest priorities if DE is to achieve its safety mission. Development of methods for addressing these goals is highly challenging.

Complementary skills and values

Desirable skills, knowledge, and motivation are shared among different training, educational and helping fields (Lonero et al., 1994). There is already considerable integration of DE knowledge objectives with other school subjects, such as physics, law, and multi-cultural understanding. New media and teaching techniques can expand the range of this integration, to the benefit of driver education and other fields. Interactive media can be used to enhance perceptual and decision skills, and attentional control that may apply to other tasks beside driving. The potential for subject matter integration into other courses seems limited to the public schools, unless some higher authority could coordinate integration between high schools and driving schools.

Also important is curriculum integration in areas of personal and social values, risk taking, self-esteem, empowerment/optimism, peer pressure, community cohesion, and health protection. These are the motivational basics of many types of pro-social and self-protective behaviors. Active participation in peer-based teaching activities could perhaps help achieve "healthy values integration." Development of such methods that could apply in driver education settings remains a high priority.

Developing supporting influences

Most novice drivers' motivation and responsibility can likely be enhanced, given a sufficiently intense education and influence program. Peer influences, community education programs, and incentives can probably contribute to a stronger impact on many novice drivers' behavior. However, some novice drivers display deviant and problem behaviors in various aspects of their lives, and they are likely at high risk on the roads as well (Bierness, 1995). The special needs of these multi-problem youngsters must be addressed by community resources.

To develop community resources, the DE industry, school authorities, insurers, governments, families, and communities must decide that they care enough about the safety of novice drivers that they will coordinate their efforts. This will require organizational change and the development of some form of compensation for organizations for the reduced autonomy and public profile (Lonero et al., 1994). Little evidence of such organizational change has yet appeared.

Parents/guardians

Parents/guardians may inadvertently contribute to the failure of DE to reach its safety goals. They appear to give better-trained novices more freedom and less supervision, and this leads to more exposure to risk and more crashes. DE needs to become more of a family intervention. To be more effective it must take advantage of the family's strengths in influencing early driving behavior and helping to build those strengths. A major problem for DE is to make parents/guardians more realistic about their children's abilities and motives, without "turning them off" formal training. Families need understanding, skills and motivation to take a more active, effective role in their novice drivers' progress to mature driving. Graduated licensing and other trends suggest a longer and stronger role for families in the future. Graduated licensing and many parent-oriented programs appear to have started promising movement in this area.

Multi-stage driver education

Beginner drivers have limited capability for absorbing information and training. As youth is said to be wasted on the young, much of driver education may be wasted on those who cannot yet drive. Readiness to learn suggests a longer-term or staged approach to driver education, as does graduated licensing (McKnight, 1984).

Graduated and provisional licensing systems (GPLs) have been implemented in many North American jurisdictions. To make GPLs effective over the long term, it will likely be necessary to coordinate graduated licensing with driver education. This will raise major questions of the organization and sequencing of DE programs to ensure a mutually supportive effect on learning and performance (Lonero, 1996). In North America, only one state (Michigan) has implemented a limited two-stage driver education requirement, which is currently being evaluated. More work has been done on this approach in Scandinavia.

Many performance objectives, such as those addressing high speeds, night driving or risk acceptance, could be left out of the first stage of a multi-stage program. They are not yet needed within the graduated licensing restrictions, or they can be provided by the accompanying parent, or may be judged better left until stage 2 in terms of readiness to learn. Stage 2 could be a cognitively oriented, risk evaluation, and decision course for those who already have "automatized" basic driving skills.

Strategic directions

Because of demographic and economic trends, the 1995 model curriculum outline predicted increased market demand for DE and increased pressure for reducing the losses produced by young, novice drivers' crashes. Issues of standards and governance, and of teacher and instructor training were expected to become more important, as the potential effectiveness of a reinvented DE curriculum increased. A continuing trend toward "privatization" of DE was seen as producing new business opportunities for driving schools, suppliers of instructional hardware and software, and instructor trainers. Standards for compatibility of hardware and software specifications were expected to become issues as media technologies developed rapidly and DE became more complex and modular (Lonero et al., 1995b). Lack of consensus about specific content were seen as leading to difficulties in sharing or marketing of software and other materials. While these 1995 expectations may now appear naively optimistic, it seems clear that the observed trends and the needs behind them remain.

It also remains clear that a more effective new driver education will need to be explicitly developmental, adaptive, and experimental to stimulate and incorporate rapid advances in knowledge and technology. DE was expected to benefit greatly from the development of interactive, individualized learning technologies (Brock, 1997; Decina et al., 1996). Computer-based instruction and part-task simulation were seen as having reached a point where their largely-untapped potential for training could see practical use, even for relatively complex capacities, such as allocation of attention (e.g., Gopher, 1992). As expected, these technologies have developed rapidly, as reflected in the AAA Foundation's DriverZed, Adept Driver's TeenSmart, and Cognifit's DriveFit (used by Young Drivers of Canada).

Interactive computer-based instruction holds further promise for more effective and efficient learning of basic skills and knowledge. However, these are the relatively easy parts of the reinvention of driver education. Greater efficiency in basic learning will free up teaching and learning resources to concentrate on the "hard parts" of driver education, which are:

1. developing students' higher cognitive processes, motivation and responsibility;
2. training teacher/facilitators who can help do this;
3. mobilizing influence resources in the family, community, industry, and government to support the teachers and students.

Summary of ongoing development needs

• Software applications to individualize and automate the teaching and testing of knowledge.
• Interactive multi-media units for training and testing the allocation of attention, visual detection, and the perception and evaluation of risk.
• Software applications to diagnose, clarify, and reinforce modification of risk-taking styles and consequences.
• Improved in-car exercises, instrumentation, and feedback for training and testing the allocation of attention, visual detection, the perception and evaluation of risk, driving decisions, and self-monitoring performance.
• Participative classroom units, individual research and study projects, and group work to enhance the basics of personal motivation and social responsibility.
• Tools, models, and instructional units to support parent involvement in the education, training, and supervision of novice drivers, both pre and post licensing.
• Organizational models, support materials, instructional units, and incentives to help mobilize community, industry, and government support.
• Coordinated development of graduated licensing systems with multi-stage or continuous-process DE formats.
• Expanded integration of DE topics and other subjects, particularly in health, community service, and other values-related areas.
• A coordinating network for DE developers and practitioners.

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REFERENCES

Bierness, D. (1995). The relationship between lifestyle factors and collisions involving young drivers. In: H. Simpson, (Ed.) New to the Road: Reducing the Risks for Young Motorists. Los Angeles: Youth Enhancement Service, University of California, Los Angeles, 71-78.

Brock, J.F. (1997). Computer based instruction. In: G. Salvendy, (Ed.), Handbook Of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 2nd edition, 578-593.

Decina, L., Gish, K., Staplin, L., & Kirchner, A. (1996) Feasibility of New Simulation Technology to Train Novice Drivers. Washington, D.C.: National Highway traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, Report No. DOT BS 808 548.

Geller, E.S., Berry, T.D., Ludwig, T.D., Evans, R.E., Gilmore, M.R., & Clarke, S.W. (1990). A conceptual framework for developing and evaluating behavior change interventions for injury control. Health Education Research, 5, 2, 125-137.

Glad, A. (1988). Phase 2 driver education effect on the risk of accident. Oslo, Norway: Norwegian Center for Research.

Gopher, D. (1992). The skill of attention control: Acquisition and execution of attention strategies. In D.E. Meyer & S. Kornblum (Eds.), Attention and performance XIV, Synergies in experimental psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive neuroscience (pp. 299-322). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Gregersen, N.P. (1996).Young drivers' overestimation of their own skill--An experiment on the relation between training strategy and skill. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 28, 243-250.

Jones, B. (1993). The effectiveness of skid-car training for teenage novice drivers in Oregon. Salem, Oregon: Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles.

Lonero, L.P., Clinton, K.M., Wilde, G.J.S., Roach, K., McKnight, A.J., MacLean, H. & Guastello, S.J. (1994). Methods to influence road user behaviour. Toronto: Ministry of Transportation.

Lonero, L.P., Clinton, K.M., Brock, J.F., Wilde, G.J.S., Laurie, I., & Black, D. (1995a). Novice driver education model curriculum outline, Washington, D.C.: AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Lonero, L., Clinton, K., Mayhew, D., and Black, D. (1995b). Approved New Driver Training - NDIP ANDT Component: Part 1: Curriculum Review. Ministry of Highways and Transportation, Government of British Columbia, Victoria, B.C.

Lonero, L. & Clinton, K. (1996). Driver education and graduated licensing: How should they fit together? Transportation Research Circular 458, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council.

Lonero, L. and Clinton, K. (1998). Changing Road User Behavior: What Works and What Doesn't. Toronto: PDE Publications. www.drivers.com.

Mayhew, D. and Simpson, H. (1995). The Role of Driving Experience: Implications for the Training and Licensing of New Drivers. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Traffic Injury Research Foundation.

Mayhew, D. and Simpson, H. (1997). Effectiveness and Role of Driver Education and Training in a Graduated Licensing System. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Traffic Injury Research Foundation.

McKnight, A.J. (1984). Driver education--when? Journal of Traffic Safety Education, January, 13-15.

OECD (1990). Behavioural adaptations to changes in the road transport system. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Road Transport Research.

Preusser, D., Ferguson, S., and Williams, A. (1997). Effects of Teenage passengers on the Fatal Crash Risk of Teenage Drivers. Arlington, Virginia: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Williams, A. (1995). Magnitude and characteristics of the young driver crash problem in the United States. In: H. Simpson, Ed., New to the Road: Reducing the Risks for Young Motorists. Los Angeles: Youth Enhancement Service, University of California, Los Angeles.

Young, K (1993). Workshop To Identify Training Requirements Designed To Reduce Young Driver Risk Taking And Improve Decision Making Skills. Washington, D.C.: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation.

Related Links:

• Drivers.com article: The up-front story about learning to drive
• Drivers.com article: Driver education: how to get results we're looking for
• Drivers.com -- articles and links on Driving Instruction

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