Guidelines for Evaluating Driver Education Now Available

Driver education courses for beginners have long been a popular and convenient means of achieving independent mobility, important to both young people and their parents. Although it seems reasonable to expect that driver education would make our novice drivers safer, most scientific evidence to date does not support this notion. Unfortunately, most evaluations of driver education to date have been rather limited in scope, and have only attempted to determine whether or not driver education "works," without shedding any light on how programs can be improved. In order to do this, evaluations need to be more comprehensive.
To improve driver training and education programs, the AAA Foundation commissioned Northport Associates to develop comprehensive guidelines on how to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs. A thorough review of the driver education evaluation literature was conducted, methods and theories of driver education programs were examined, and various evaluation methods, measures, and data sources were assessed.
Three reports were developed from this project, a brief description of each follows:

• Management Overview - serves as a primer for driving school owners and managers who may be considering initiating a formal evaluation program
• How-To Guide - facilitates relatively simple, in-house evaluations of driver education programs
• Comprehensive Guidelines - serves as a reference for researchers and professional program evaluators who design and execute comprehensive evaluations

These reports are available online at http://www.aaafoundation.org/research