Child Development and the Aims of Road Safety Education—A Review and Analysis.
By J A Thomson, A Tolmie, H C Foot, and B McLaren. (Pp 131; £19.00.) Department of Transport Road Safety Research Report No 1. Norwich: HMSO, 1996. ISBN 0-11-551-797-9.
- Community Child Health, Department of Child Health, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
This book challenges the widely held views in road safety that young children are biologically incapable of coping with the road environment, until an appropriate stage of psychological development is reached. It thus provides an informative framework for a debate on the aims and objectives of road safety education and usefully contributes to the debate on the relative role of education, engineering, and urban planning methods in injury prevention.
The report was commissioned by the Department of Transport from a team of developmental psychologists at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. The first author, James Thomson has been actively involved in the development and evaluation of both experimental and operational road safety programmes, but the report ranges more widely than the authors' own programmes.
The book comprises five main sections: (1) aims and objectives of road safety education, (2) current methods employed in road safety education, (3) theories relating to child development, (4) implications of these theories for training, and (5) conclusions and recommendations. A clear and concise executive summary is provided and there are useful summary sections for each …
