Contents and Assessment of Traffic Education Programmes
SWOV Fact Sheet
Source: Institute for Road Safety Research (SWOV)
The purpose of traffic education is to equip road users so well that they can participate safely in traffic. A good traffic education programme aims at unsafe behaviour and, of course the group that performs this behaviour and can change it. A programme should also take the background for this behaviour into account. The effects of an education programme can best be measured by examining the self-reported or observed behaviour that the education was aimed at, and not by a criterion such as crash involvement. In an effect measurement it is important to have a control group as well as an experimental (in this case education) group in order to separate the effects of education from other influences. It is also necessary to exclude volunteer bias as much as possible, i.e. the subjects should be drawn as randomly as possible for either the control or experimental group. In addition, it is essential to determine any differences between the two groups by means of a pre-test.
