Good, i.e. effective, education requires logical cohesion between the road safety problem, current and intended behaviour and the didactic method. Fishers and colleagues [16] distinguish 10 steps or topics that are relevant in assessing the quality of a traffic education programme:
- Problem behaviour: is the issue relevant?
- Target group: is the target group unambiguously defined?
- Learning goals: are the learning goals sufficiently concrete?
- Working methods: are the working methods suited to the target group and the learning goals?
- Design: is the content correct and the design appropriate?
- Intermediate progress: is intermediate learning progress measured?
- Manual: is there a manual and is it clear?
- Implementation: are the practical aspects of implementation well described?
- Process evaluation: is an inventory of users' experiences provided?
- Effect measurement: have the effects of the programme been measured (appropriately)?
These steps largely correspond to the handbook of the European project LEARN! for developing and implementing traffic education programmes [17]:
Furthermore, it is important that a programme has clear, concrete main goals and learning goals, that the lesson content matches these one-to-one, and that the didactic methods fit the way children of a certain age learn [3] - see the question What are goals of traffic education? and What didactic principles and working methods are there?. Twisk [18] for example concludes that there is a need for programmes that allow young people to practice in complex traffic situations, but in which additional hazards are reduced as much as possible. In the practice of the school system, however, this is not easy to achieve. Possibly, simulated conditions, for example using simulators or virtual reality could offer a more practical alternative (see the question What didactic principles and teaching formats are there?).
