The (Tailored) Future of New Driver Training

by

New dri­ver train­ing study high­lights impor­tance of post-licence skills (Sci­ence Network):

“Crash rates are high­est imme­di­ate­ly after licensing…so there is poten­tial for improv­ing safe­ty dur­ing the first six months,” Dr Bean­land says…“Driving involves a high­ly com­plex skill set, so dri­vers need some kind of train­ing and prac­tice to acquire those skills…The paper found cog­ni­tive skills train­ing (par­tic­u­lar­ly haz­ard per­cep­tion) had the poten­tial to sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce crash risk, and pro­ce­dur­al skills train­ing (specif­i­cal­ly vehi­cle han­dling) was effec­tive at improv­ing the tech­ni­cal skills of drivers…The review con­cludes it appears that dif­fer­ent types of train­ing enhance the safe­ty of novice dri­vers at dif­fer­ent stages of the licen­sure process and as such, pro­grams should be tai­lored to spe­cif­ic pop­u­la­tions and eval­u­at­ed accordingly.”

Study: Is there a case for dri­ver train­ing? A review of the effi­ca­cy of pre- and post-licence dri­ver train­ing (Safe­ty Science)

  • Abstract: Although dri­ver train­ing pro­grams are cur­rent­ly pop­u­lar, the degree to which they reduce crash involve­ment remains ambigu­ous. This paper aims to deter­mine how effec­tive dri­ver train­ing has been in improv­ing young novice dri­vers’ on-road safe­ty and to iden­ti­fy key research lim­i­ta­tions. A lit­er­a­ture review was under­tak­en exam­in­ing eval­u­a­tions of dri­ver train­ing pro­grams, pri­mar­i­ly those pub­lished with­in the past decade (2001–2011). The review utilised peer-reviewed jour­nals, con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, books, gov­ern­ment reports and con­sul­tant reports. Both pre- and post-licence train­ing pro­grams were con­sid­ered. Pre-licence train­ing pro­grams aim to devel­op the skills that are required to obtain a driver’s licence and dri­ve safe­ly, such as basic vehi­cle con­trol and traf­fic assess­ment. Post-licence train­ing pro­grams aim to enhance skills that are con­sid­ered rel­e­vant to crash pre­ven­tion includ­ing skid con­trol, haz­ard per­cep­tion and advanced vehi­cle con­trol skills. The results of the review indi­cate that some forms of train­ing have been effec­tive for pro­ce­dur­al skill acqui­si­tion and oth­er pro­grams have been found to improve dri­vers’ haz­ard per­cep­tion. Con­verse­ly, evi­dence sug­gests that tra­di­tion­al dri­ver train­ing pro­grams have not reduced young dri­vers’ crash risk. Cau­tion is urged when inter­pret­ing this find­ing as major method­olog­i­cal flaws were iden­ti­fied in pre­vi­ous eval­u­a­tion stud­ies, includ­ing: no con­trol group; non-ran­dom group assign­ment; fail­ure to con­trol or mea­sure con­found­ing vari­ables; and poor pro­gram design. Fur­ther, the valid­i­ty and use­ful­ness of crash rates as an out­come mea­sure is ques­tion­able. More robust research should be under­tak­en to eval­u­ate dri­ver train­ing pro­grams, using more sen­si­tive mea­sures to assess dri­vers’ on-road safety.

Relat­ed articles: