Effect of Pedestrian Safety Retraining for Elementary and Middle School Students

Abstract

A pedestrian safety educational training program was presented to more than 930 students in Grades 2 through 7 at five public schools in Detroit, Michigan. Initial student training was performed at four of the schools during spring 2008 and at the remaining school during fall 2008. Retraining was performed 7 to 12 months after the initial training. The same training procedures were used during both the initial training and the retraining sessions. The training program was evaluated with the use of both written pre- and posttesting and before-and-after observations of the street-crossing behavior of children near the schools included in the study. Two measures of effectiveness (MOEs) were used for the evaluation: (a) the violation rate for child pedestrians and (b) the percentage of correct test responses. The child pedestrian violation rate decreased shortly after the initial training; this decrease was sustained for several months. Retraining produced an additional incremental decrease in the child pedestrian violation rate. Initial training also produced increases in the percentages of correct responses between the pre- and posttests for children in all participating grade levels. The increases in correct response percentages were partially sustained several months after the initial training, although measurable decreases in test scores were observed. Retraining provided a statistically significant incremental increase in test scores that negated the decreases observed several months after the initial training. The cumulative impact of initial training combined with retraining was consistently larger than the impact of initial training alone for both the testing and the violation rate MOEs.