Accid. Anal. & Prev. Vol. 19, No. 5, pp. 327-341, 1987 Printed in Great Britain. oool-4575187 $3.00 + .oo 0 1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd. TRAINING CHILDREN IN ROAD CROSSING SKILLS USING A ROADSIDE SIMULATION DAVID S. YOUNG and DAVID N. LEE Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, United Kingdom zyxwvutsrqponmlk (Received 7 March 1985; in revised form 13 June 1986) Abstract-Five-year-old children were trained in road-crossing skill using a new method which allows them to act safely in relation to vehicies on a normal road. The children learned to time their crossings of a “pretend road” as if the vehicles were on this, rather than on the adjacent road. A previous study, using a single lane of traffic, showed that many children performed well in this simulation with minima1 instruction, but that five-year-olds were generally less proficient than older children. In the present study, the method was extended to the more realistic case of two-way traffic, and training programmes for five-year-olds were assessed. (In addition, the performances of adults in the two-way pretend task and in actually crossing the road were compared; the results confirmed the validity of the simulation. After a few sessions of guided practice, the children’s efficiency in making use of gaps by setting off promptly after a vehicle had passed improved markedly; in single-lane crossing they reached almost adult standard. In both single-lane and two-way crossing they became as successful as adults in completing their crossings before a second vehicle passed and they took account of the duration of the gap by crossing more quickly when time was short. They remained very cautious, rejecting many ad- equate gaps. The standard of performance after a few sessions of two-way crossing was maintained over a three week break in training. Practice with one-way traffic did not help them with two- way crossing. In sum, after practice in the simulation, five year olds develop a degree of com- petence normally shown by older children, whose experience on the roads puts them at lower risk. This suggests that the simulation, which allows children to safely explore and develop their capabilities more fully than when actually crossing the road, would be a valuable addition to road safety programmes. 1. INTRODUCTION Training children to cross the road safely is an urgent problem. Over 2,700 child pe- destrians aged 5-9 years were killed or seriously injured on British roads in 1984; this was about four times the casualty rate (per 100,000 population) for 20-59 year old adults. The peak age for accidents is five to six years, when children are increasingly exposed to traffic [Howarth, Routledge and Repetto-Wright, 19741. Later, accidents decrease despite increasing exposure to risk. This indicates that the skill acquired through practice outpaces the risk. Therefore to ensure that skill always keeps ahead, training needs to be started as young as possible. At present, road safety instruction mainly takes place in the classroom or play- ground. While this gives children knowledge of traffic at a conceptual level, experiments indicate that it does little to improve their know-how on roads, which requires practice in traffic situations [Nummenmaa and Syvanen, 1974; Rothengatter, 1981; Wells, Down- ing and Bennett, 19791. This is not surprising. One would hardly expect to learn to drive by just sitting at a desk. The problem is to devise safe training methods that are sufficiently unconstraining that children can get good practice and learn by their mistakes. One method is crossing the road under adult supervision. This has proved effective in teaching 4 to 6-year-olds how to position themselves at junctions and in the vicinity of parked cars, so that they can scan the road for approaching vehicles and cross when the road is clear [Rothengatter, 19841. However, the method has important limitations when training children how to cross safely in the presence of traffic, which they also need to learn. Acquiring this skill, as any skill, entails acting and observing the consequences of the action. Mistakes are inevitably made and are subsequently corrected; this is an integral part of the learning process. The problem with supervised road-crossing is that the child has to be prevented from making mistakes because the situation is too dangerous. Thus, what is required is a road-crossing simulation where a child can, in safety, properly explore his/her capa- AAP 19:5-A 327