This How-To Guide is intended to help improve driver education programs through formative evaluation. It provides hands-on, step-by-step guidance especially for driving school operators and owners, program developers, and managers. There are two companion documents: Evaluating Driver Education Programs: Comprehensive Guidelines, a more extensive and detailed evaluation manual; and Evaluating Driver Education Programs: Management Overview, a concise introduction to evaluating driver education programs. The Comprehensive Guidelines provide a detailed background for planning, conducting, and integrating effective evaluation into beginner driver education program development and policy. A range of evaluations from simple to complex are covered, primarily for program evaluators, researchers, and other technical audiences. The Guidelines include actual tools, such as questionnaires, focus group guides, and log books that can be used or adapted for evaluating beginner driver education programs. The Management Overview is intended for driving school owners, driver educators, program managers, administrators, and others with limited experience in research. The Overview provides a general introduction to the art and science of program evaluation, with a specific focus on how program evaluation concepts and methods can be applied to driver education evaluation. The three documents together are intended to meet the needs of different people in the driver education field and to support better, more focused evaluations. They provide a set of tools that can be used to carefully and rigorously examine beginner driver education programs. It is hoped that their use will result in a growing body of evaluation data that can be built upon, leading to better driver education programs and, ultimately, safer young drivers. The three documents and related evaluation resources are also available on the web site of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, http://www.aaafoundation.org. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting