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Browsing by Author "Duke, Rebekah"

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    Development of Curriculum for the Virginia Driver's Licensing Ceremony
    Duke, Rebekah; Klauer, Charlie; Baker, Stephanie Ann (National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence, 2017-12-06)
    In Virginia, to receive the actual driver’s license (as opposed to the temporary driving permit), both a parent and the teenage driver must appear before a family district court judge and participate in the Virginia Driver’s Licensing Ceremony. This is an opportune moment when safety information is disseminated to parents and their novice drivers. These ceremonies are written and created primarily by district court judges. While some judges have taken a great deal of time and compiled excellent information, others are unsure about the information that should be relayed. The purpose of this project was to develop a PowerPoint presentation and handout based on contemporary teen driving research and to disseminate the materials to district court judges throughout the state of Virginia for use in their licensing ceremonies. The PowerPoint presentation included the slides but also was accompanied with a script for the judges to use during the presentation. The slides and script provide parents and teens with key safety information, including the driving risks teens face, the Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) laws in Virginia, and how to use a parent-teen driving contract as a mechanism for risk reduction and parental management.
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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.