Tackling children's road safety through edutainment: an evaluation of effectiveness

Abstract

The burgeoning market in electronic media has encouraged a trend toward 'edutainment', where entertaining, media-based materials are used to facilitate educational outcomes. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a video that has recently been released by a popular children's entertainment group to help tackle Britain's poor record on children's road safety. We wished to determine whether the video had an impact on either children's knowledge or parents' awareness of pedestrian skills, when used in a standard home-based fashion. A total of 120 families participated, all of whom had children 5 years of age. Half the families received videos at the beginning of the study, while the other half served as a control group against which to measure change in the treatment group. Data were gathered at baseline and again 1 month later, using a series of tailored questionnaire items. A robust pattern of null findings indicated that the video, when used in this casual fashion, had no educational impact on either parents or children. Crucially, however, parents strongly believed that it had. The discussion explores the implications of such a mismatch and highlights similarities with outcomes of other health education interventions.

Environmentální výchova hrou - výsledky dopravní kampaně pro děti „Oblékáme hada Edu“

“…Nízká fyzická aktivita přispívá ke vzniku kardiovaskulárních chorob, diabetu typu 2 a obezitě (Raitakari et al, 1994). Naopak přínosy aktivní dopravy (přede-vším cyklistiky a chůze) pro celou populaci jsou mnohé, kromě vyšší fyzické aktivity také snížení skleníkových plynů, méně hluku a dalších emisí z dopravy, nižší spotřeba fosilních paliv a více příležitostí pro sociální interakce a poznávání prostředí (Percer, 2009;Schwebel et al, 2012;Zeedyk a Wallace, 2003). Dopravně-environmentální hra "Oblékáme hada Edu" přináší dětem nový pohled na jejich dopravní chování a volbu dopravního prostředku.…”

A game-based learning approach to road safety

“…This was an important goal, since other interventions have successfully transferred knowledge, and therefore a core road safety objective is not to communicate safe crossing principles to children, but rather to ensure they apply them in practice [4]. Hence, as a novel approach to road safety, multiple underlying pedagogic approaches were explored.…”

“…As an emerging form of public e-health intervention, game based learning offers a potential avenue by which to reach demographics which are unresponsive to more formal methods of instruction, with the goal of fostering an attitudinal, and subsequently behavioural, change [3]. This may hold particularly true for the case of children aged 10-15, who present a unique road safety challenge in that their unsafe behaviour is predominantly linked to their failure to apply knowledge of safe practices [4], rather than lacking the knowledge itself.…”

“…Reaching this demographic with targeted safety interventions is a demanding task. Knowledge transfer alone has been shown to be inadequate [4]; often children are aware of the principles of safe crossing, but fail to enact them in practice. The causes of this are numerous, though key factors include peer-group pressure and perceived social norms [8], as well as overestimation of ability and underestimation of the likelihood and severity of injury [9].…”

Children’s pedestrian route selection: Efficacy of a video and internet training protocol

“…Some have reported positive change from use of videos/computer software to improve children's ability to judge safe traffic gaps in pedestrian settings (Glang, Noell, Ary, & Swartz, 2005; Limbourg & Gerber, 1981; Preusser & Lund, 1988), but other have not, both in the pedestrian safety domain (Zeedyk & Wallace, 2003) and in related child health education domains such as dog bite prevention (Schwebel, Morrongiello, Davis, Stewart, & Bell, 2012). …”