The Future of Education

The Swedish driver education curriculum is based on Goals for Driver Education GDE [1], where an emphasis on motivational factors and risk-awareness in driving is added to the traditional vehicular handling and mastering of traffic situations. A large proportion of deaths from traffic crashes are due to human causes [2] and young drivers are especially prone to crashes due to their lack of experience, lack of risk-perception, and tending to overestimate their driving ability [3]. A driver education curriculum should make sure that risk-awareness and motivational factors are trained and assessed. A challenge in driver assessment is to ensure that a driver’s risk-awareness is sufficiently tested during the on-road exam, since many risks are uncommon. Driving simulators offer a safe and controllable environment for education and training [4], and have been shown useful in systematically testing a driver's perception, risk-awareness, and performance in uncommon but safety-critical situations [5]. The potential benefit of a more unified use of driving simulators in driver education is examined in a Ph.D. project. One part of the project is an on-going study with the aim of exploring situations that are suitable for training and testing risk-awareness. The research questions are: 1) What kind of situations are suitable to include? 2) In a specific situation, which parts of GDE are covered? A web-based questionnaire will be distributed to 60 driver educators, well familiar with GDE, who will assess each situation presented both visually and verbally. Preliminary results from a pilot test with 10 participants indicate that the situations are suitable for educating and testing and that they are mainly focused on the second level of the GDE. Final results will be presented at the conference.