Research undertaken by Dr Suzanne Zeedyk, Katy Jones and Karen Larter, from the University of Dundee, together with two members of Tayside Police Road Safety Unit, Linda Wallace and Bill Carcary, and published today, Monday 17 December, in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, studied the effectiveness of road safety programmes using an intriguing simulation of children's traffic-related behaviour.
One hundred and twenty children aged four to five, in three primary schools in Scotland, were studied. Interventions were investigated,using three commercially marketed products: a three-dimensional model of the traffic environment, a road safety board game, and poster materials illustrating a road safety talk. These three approaches were effective in increasing children's knowledge about safe and dangerous locations. Moreover, this increased level of knowledge remained, six months afterwards.
Forty-seven of the children from the first study took part in a second study, designed to test their on-road performance. In this study, a school outing was arranged, comprising a variety of activities, including three road-crossing situations where children had to decide about a safe place to cross the road. They were inconspicuously filmed, crossing at an obscured junction, near moving traffic, and between parked cars. Out of sight, police stopped the traffic, so the children were in no danger. The children's knowledge of such situations had been tested in the first study. The crossings were made in the midst of an entertaining 'treasure trail', and the fact that they were crossing the road was never explicitly pointed out to them. Thus, road crossing situations were created, resembling those encountered in everyday life.
The results showed that the children's increased knowledge did not result in improved traffic behaviour. It is clear that there is a need to distinguish between children's road safety knowledge and their behaviour. In addition, parents are often lulled into a false sense of security that, because their young children know the 'rules' about crossing the road, they will apply this knowledge in the actual situation.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Dan Garbutt, Assistant Press Officer, tel. 0116 252 9500 (work), 0116 270 2918 (home).
REFERENCE: Zeedyk S. (2001) Children and road safety: Increasing knowledge does not improve behaviour. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 573-594.