This report documents the procedures and findings of a preliminary study of biographical, demographical, and professional background factors of instructors in driver education. A number of driver education programs in Texas were visited by researchers armed with structured interview and observational procedures, and those programs were captured in a cross-sectional set of data. Student scores on an especially designed knowledge test were gathered, and these students were tracked for twelve months through their driver records with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Sixty-one instructors and nearly 1300 students formed the basis for the study. The study also featured an extensive literature survey, the results of which are documented in this report. Descriptive statistics on a reasonably broad sampling of two- and three-phase (with one four-phase) driver education programs and their personnel should prove useful to researchers. Inferences from these data of statistical significance were tentative at best. Suggestions were that older teachers tended to be less effective in producing drivers with clean records, perhaps because their presentations have become routinized. Those who followed what are considered to be accepted methods of instruction produced more drivers with violations than those who were less orthodox. Subjective rankings of instructors was a better positive predictor of good driver production than structured checklists.
Abstract