Guidelines for assessing road safety education

These guidelines provides schools with useful questions about the efficacy of road safety education initiatives offered to their school and community.

Guidelines

1. How will this Road Safety Education initiative/intervention or programme contribute to the outcomes for learning in our school?

Like any learning experience, a proposed initiative or intervention should support the student outcomes contained in your school's charter and key curriculum documents. For ease of reference, schools can make a straight-forward road safety education policy that pulls together how the school integrates road safety into curriculum delivery, the role of students, parents and teachers, and standard road safety procedures around the school. Check new initiatives against this.

Example school road safety education policy

2. How will our school and our students build on the learning offered from the proposed Road Safety Education initiative or intervention or programme?

• Prior Knowledge: Identify prior knowledge, skills, competencies, attitudes and or behaviours relevant to goal
• Link, Relate, Extend: Link prior knowledge with new ideas relevant to goal - relate these ideas in different ways and then extend these ideas to create new mental models
• Think about thinking: Provide opportunities for thinking about your mental model about goal - what am I doing? Where am I going? How well is it going? and what are my next steps?
• Multiple ways: Allow multiple ways of knowing ideas about learning goal, multiple ways of interacting with ideas around learning goal and multiple opportunities to practice skills and behaviours around learning goal.
• Feedback: Allow feedback on the new learning

3. Does the Road Safety Education initiative/intervention programme support our whole school approach towards road safety?
Or
Is the Road Safety Education initiative/intervention or programme underpinned by the Good Practice in Road Safety research summaries?

Good practice in road safety describes research findings on effective practice in road safety initiatives for young people.

There is now a reasonable body of evidence about what works and what doesn’t in road safety education, with detailed evaluations available from injury prevention initiatives internationally.

The research summaries include a guide on how to plan your teaching programmes or community interventions.

Good practice in road safety

4. Will the group/individual offering the Road Safety Education initiative/interventions or programme be credible and effective from the participant's perspective?

Students of all ages need educators who relate to them well, show respect, and are open to challenges and questions. Ask providers about their educational experience and request a summary of participant evaluations. Work out what role the school's teachers will have in supporting student learning during and after any initiative.

For more information on what effective road safety education looks like at the level of school, classroom, individual, family and whānau, see:

Good practice in road safety

5. What monitoring and evaluation is planned that will contribute to our school's learning outcomes and to the students road safety education outcomes?

A senior manager or a lead teacher may take responsibility for road safety education within the school, making an annual check that the school's road safety policy is relevant, up to date and in use across the school.

This person can work with classroom teachers to use assessment data (including student self-assessment) to identify outcomes of road safety initiatives. Outcomes can be checked against the learning processes outlined in the Road Map.

Road Map – Road safety resources for schools 

6. Is the Road Safety Education initiative/intervention or programme designed to provide the participants with a positive learning experience that achieves an on-going learning outcome?

Effective road safety education is founded on a pedagogy that makes student learning interesting, relevant, authentic and enjoyable. Learning experiences are age-appropriate, contain sufficient opportunities to learn, and influence lifelong choices and behaviours. For more detail on what students may learn and when, read the Road Map.

Road Map – Road safety resources for schools