Development, Validation, and Application of School Audit Tool (SAT): An Effective Instrument for Assessing Traffic Safety and Operation Around Schools

Abstract

There is a need for a reliable school audit tool with well-defined scales to convert qualitative evaluation of existing school sites into a quantitative assessment in order to help public agencies to improve schools’ safety and efficiency. In this study, a new, simple, and versatile School Audit Tool (SAT) was developed and tested. SAT was formed using a 30-item checklist categorized into four domains: school site assessment, road network assessment, parking/loading assessment, and active transport assessment. The tool was applied on a sample of 22 schools. Then, categorical and item-by-item Intraclass Correlation Coefficients (ICC) were calculated to validate the tool. The results showed acceptable overall test-retest (ICC = 0.919) and inter-rater reliability (ICC = 0.843) across all items and domains. SAT’s adaptable framework to assess and compare the safety and efficiency of schools is reliable, easy-to-use, and comprehensive. The tool is also effective in ranking schools and identifying items that may require upgrades or modifications.

Assessing Walking and Cycling around Schools

“…The tool, however, did not include different important transport features related to the school environment, such as the road network and parking area. Consequently, the most recent 30-item tool developed by [32] is a simple, comprehensive, and straight-forward school audit tool that covers different audit items commonly used or recommended in the literature [32].…”

“…In developing countries, there is a need for a simple, adaptable, and comprehensive school audit tool. Since the SAT (school audit tool) was recently developed and validated in Qatar [32], the tool was selected for this study. This tool can be used for assessing safety (road network and school site characteristics) and efficiency (parking/loading facilities) of schools besides assessment of walkability (active transport elements).…”

“…The 30-item audit tool, SAT, used in this study was recently developed by Shaaban et al [32] as an effective tool to assess the infrastructure around schools (see Table 1). In this tool, the items were sorted into four groups, namely school site, road network, parking-loading, and active transport.…”

“…Moreover, a 4-point Likert-type scale was adopted in this tool to rate each item ordinally as 1 to 4 (undesirable, poor, acceptable, and good), making it possible to assess each item with ease, consistency, and detail across schools. A detailed description of the four ordinal scores for all items under the four assessment categories can be found in the SAT form [32].…”