Evaluation of North Carolina Adaptation of NHTSA’s Child Pedestrian Safety Curriculum

Abstract

NHTSA designed the Child Pedestrian Safety Curriculum to meet current national learning standards so that it could be added to a school’s regular syllabus. The curriculum focuses on pedestrian safety knowledge and skills identified by previous research as effective in reducing pedestrian crashes. The North Carolina Department of Transportation adapted NHTSA’s curriculum to arrive at the pedestrian module of the Let’s Go NC! pedestrian and bicycle safety program. The objectives of this research project were to examine how implementation of the curriculum was achieved by schools, teachers, and caregivers at a test site and to assess the degree to which the teaching of the curriculum translated to increased knowledge of safety and overall safer behaviors among students taught. The results from this study suggest that the Let’s Go NC! pedestrian safety module had a positive impact on students even when varying instructional approaches were used. The program appeared to be especially effective for increasing the self-reported pedestrian knowledge and supervised crossing behaviors of students in third grade and above. The study also showed only small improvements in child pedestrian behaviors in natural settings around the intervention schools. This finding suggests more may need to be done to have a greater impact on the behaviors of unsupervised children. At this point, it is unknown if repeated exposure to the curriculum, as intended in its design, would further increase the pedestrian safety knowledge and behaviors of students.