National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence Reports (NSTSCE, VTTI)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/5529
http://www.vtti.vt.edu/national/nstsce/

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Browsing National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence Reports (NSTSCE, VTTI) by Author "Ankem, Gayatri"

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    Do Real-time and Post Hoc Feedback Reduce Teen Drivers' Engagement in Secondary Tasks?
    Hua, Lesheng; Ankem, Gayatri; Noble, Alexandria; Baynes, Peter; Klauer, Charlie; Dingus, Thomas A. (National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence, 2023-08-02)
    In 2020, 2,800 teens in the United States between the ages of 13 and 19 were killed in motor vehicle crashes (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023). The purpose of this study is to assess if there is an additional benefit to the driver feedback system implemented in the Driver Coach Study (Klauer et al., 2017) on secondary task reduction and if the same trends of parental involvement are observed. The data used in this study were drawn from two previously completed naturalistic driving studies involving teenage drivers. The Driver Coach Study recruited 90 teen-parent dyads and presented the teen driver with feedback on their driving performance for the first 6 months (Klauer et al., 2017). Parents were able to review a website that provided information on the feedback that their teen received. The Driver Coach Study data were compared to the Supervised Practice Driving Study, which observed 88 teenage drivers during naturalistic driving in the same geographic location who did not receive feedback. Novice driver secondary task engagement was recorded. Parental involvement was examined by tracking which teen/parent groups checked the website and which did not. Results suggest that teen drivers who received feedback were overall less likely to engage in secondary tasks as well as less likely to multitask than those teen drivers who did not receive feedback. Additionally, females generally engaged in secondary tasks more often than males. Teen drivers whose parents logged in to the feedback website also reduced their engagement in some secondary tasks but not all. Unfortunately, no significant reduction in cell phone use was observed between teen drivers who received feedback and those who did not. Overall, the results suggest that further research should be conducted, as monitoring and feedback for teen drivers does reduce overall secondary task engagement.
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    Driver Coach Study: Using Real-time and Post Hoc Feedback to Improve Teen Driving Habits
    Klauer, Charlie; Ankem, Gayatri; Guo, Feng; Baynes, Peter; Fang, Youjia; Atkins, Whitney; Baker, Stephanie Ann; Duke, Rebekah; Hankey, Jonathan M.; Dingus, Thomas A. (National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence, 2017-12-08)
    Novice teenage drivers have the highest rates of fatalities and injuries on U.S. roadways compared to any other age group. This experimental research was conducted to see if presenting novice teenage drivers and their parents with feedback on teen driving performance could decrease rates of crash/near-crash (CNC) involvement. Ninety-two newly licensed teens had their vehicles instrumented with a data acquisition system (the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s MiniDAS) and received driving feedback in the form of a light and a tone when a potentially risky behavior was detected. Behaviors, such as swerving, speeding, lane changing without a turn signal, hard braking, hard turning, and fast starts, were used to determine when feedback was administered. Feedback continued for six months and then was turned off for one month (in the seventh month) to determine if risky behaviors returned after feedback stopped. These data were compared to a separate study (the Supervised Practice Driving Study [SPDS]) of 90 teenage drivers in the same geographic location who did not receive feedback. Parental involvement was examined by tracking which teen/parent groups checked the website and which did not. Results suggest that real-time and post hoc feedback produce a relative reduction in the rate of CNC involvement, but only when the parent is logging in to the website. If parents do not log in to the website to review the coachable events, real-time and post hoc feedback do not improve CNC rates. The analyses also indicated that once feedback was turned off in Month 7, teen CNC rates returned to baseline levels, which suggests that 6 months of feedback is not enough time to instill safe driving habits in novice drivers. This result also suggests that parental involvement in driver education must continue through the independent driving phase to improve teen CNC rates. In general, these results support previous research on monitoring and feedback, which suggest that parental involvement is critical in improving teen driving safety. These results also support current Graduated Driver’s Licensing (GDL) policies and provide research-based evidence that these policies should be strengthened.
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    Improving Driving Safety for Teenagers with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
    Klauer, Charlie; Ollendick, Thomas H.; Ankem, Gayatri; Dingus, Thomas A. (National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence, 2017-09-19)
    The majority of the research assessing the differences in driving performance between medicated and non-medicated Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) teenagers has relied on driving simulators and surveys. This pilot study was conducted in a real-world environment using a naturalistic driving methodology where continuous driving data were collected for 15 to 24 months (9 months of learner’s permit driving and at least 6 months of early licensure driving) using the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s NextGen data acquisition system. Ten teenaged drivers (15.5 and 16 years of age) with learner’s permits and diagnoses of ADHD were recruited, and their driving data were compared to a control group of 45 newly licensed teen drivers from the Supervised Practice Driving Study who scored 0 on the Disruptive Behavior Disorder Rating Scale rating scale, and thus were confirmed to be free of ADHD symptoms. The mean crash and near-crash (CNC) rates per 1,000 hours for the ADHD group and the control group were 22.59 and 11.53, respectively. The data were further analyzed to investigate driver behaviors that contributed to the occurrence of CNC events. Although both groups engaged in risky driver behaviors during CNC events, when the two groups were compared, the results showed that ADHD novice teen drivers engaged in risky driving behaviors, particularly those related to vehicle mishandling, more frequently than non-ADHD teens. The ADHD teens were also more distracted by engagement with high-risk secondary tasks, such as texting and passenger interaction, which have been found to significantly increase the risk of CNC involvement, than non-ADHD teen drivers.