Driver education is designed to teach new drivers the rules of the road and the driving skills to prepare for the road test and obtain a driver’s license. Most jurisdictions, in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, deliver driver education in high schools and/or commercial driving schools. These programs typically consist of both “theoretical” instruction in the classroom and practical training in the vehicle. Although driver education provides an efficient means to learn how to drive, evaluations have failed to show that such formal programs produce safer drivers. The overall investigation involved a multi-site, multi-level evaluation of beginner driver education programs in the United States and Canada that aimed to: * Generate new knowledge about the outcomes, impact, and operational effectiveness of driver education; * Provide new information about how to improve the delivery and content of driver education to enhance its safety impact; * Demonstrate implementation of the AAA Foundation’s Comprehensive Guidelines for evaluating driver education; and, * Showcase potentially more effective and constructive methods to evaluate driver education. Phase II of the research initially focused on the development of evaluation designs in the three priority jurisdictions —Michigan, Oregon, and Manitoba. Montana replaced Michigan as a study jurisdiction. The evaluation designs were implemented in Manitoba and in Oregon but not in Montana due to funding constraints. The principal foci are on evaluating the extent to which driver education programs influence student outcomes in Manitoba and Oregon (e.g., improvements in knowledge, attitudes, and safer behaviour) and on the impact of these programs in terms of crash reduction in Oregon. This report describes the results of the investigation in Manitoba and Oregon. A second report describes in more detail the methods and tools investigated and employed in the evaluations of the driver education programs in these study sites. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting