How useful is additional training after driving licence acquisition?

Answer

For young drivers

The usefulness of additional training for young drivers, also called advanced driver training, lacks convincing evidence [26]. What is definitely ineffective is training that focuses on short-term teaching of skills, such as skid courses. Obligatory skid courses in Norway, Sweden and Finland proved not to have any or to have an adverse effect on crash risk [27].

The courses are too short to result in automatism of complex, sometimes counterintuitive actions needed to avoid or correct skidding. Candidates having taken a skidding course do, however, think they have mastered the necessary skills. This makes them overconfident resulting in higher risk-taking than drivers who have not taken the course.  

Advanced training courses focusing on improving traffic insight and enhancing self-awareness are more effective; see for example  the ADVANCED-project [28]. But even then, success is not self-evident. After a Dutch training, based on the ADVANCED-ideas, attitude, self-assessment, and risk acceptance proved to have improved at just one of the two training locations, and to have deteriorated at the other training location [29]. There is evidence to suggest personal convictions about the effectiveness of the ADVANCED-project were a factor in the differing impacts of the lessons at the two training locations.

In Finland and Austria, obligatory additional training for novice drivers has been assessed. After introduction of the obligatory advanced training course in Finland, no decrease in crash risk was found in the first year and a half after licence acquisition [30]. Austria has imposed the most extensive further training courses in the first two years after licence acquisition. Novice drivers have to return for a driving improvement course at six different moments. The crash risk in Austria may have decreased after this extensive further training course, albeit that the research proving this was not methodologically strong [31] [32].

Senserrick [33] concludes that, in Australia, a general training for adolescents, focusing on risk behaviour and resilience (such as resistance to peer pressure), may have a positive impact on road user behaviour. She concludes that this is more effective than a training course focusing on hazard perception in traffic.

For experienced drivers

An extensive meta-analysis by the Cochrane institute has shown that follow-up training for experienced drivers (whether obligatory or not) does not result in crash risk decrease [34]. Nevertheless, some training forms may be effective. For large companies employing a great many drivers, follow-up training focusing on insight in one’s own limitations, perception and interpretation of traffic conditions may result in a crash risk decrease among the drivers [35] [36].

Part of fact sheet

Driver training and driving tests

In the Netherlands, licence acquisition courses for category B (passenger cars) are concluded by a theoretical and a practical test.

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