Teaching Pedestrian Safety Skills to Young Children: An Analysis and One‐year Followup

Abstract

Twenty-four elementary school children in grades K-3 participated in a study to teach six street-crossing skills: (1) wait at curb, (2) look all ways, (3) watch vehicle distance, (4) walk, (5) continue to look, and (6) use crosswalk. The effects of an instructional package implemented on the street corner were evaluated using a multiple-baseline design across two groups of six children at each of two schools. Rapid acquisition of pedestrian skills was evident at both schools. Average skill levels improved from 44% during baseline to 97% after training at School A and from 21% to 86% at School B. Data taken at a second street at each school were used to assess setting generality of safety behaviors. A one-year followup of 14 children indicated that pedestrian safety skills either maintained at high levels or could be quickly recovered from intermediate levels after remedial training. This research represents a first step in the solution of just one of the many community problems involving safety-deficient settings.

Teaching Safety Skills to Children: Prevention of Firearm Injury as an Exemplar of Best Practice in Assessment, Training, and Generalization of Safety Skills

“…BST has been shown to be effective in teaching a variety of safety skills including pedestrian safety skills (e. g., Yeaton & Bailey, 1978), fire safety skills (e. g., Jones, Kazdin, & Haney, 1981;Jones, Ollendick, McLaughlin, & Williams, 1989), sexual abuse prevention skills (e. g., Lumley et al, 1998;Miltenberger et al, 1999;Miltenberger, Thiesse-Duffy, Suda, Kozak, & Bruellman, 1990;Stillwell, Lutzker, & Green, 1988), abduction prevention skills (e. g., Johnson et al, 2005Johnson et al, , 2006Marchand-Martella, Huber, Martella, & Wood, 1996;Miltenberger & Olson, 1996;Poche, Brower, & Swearingen, 1981), and firearm injury prevention skills (e. g., Miltenberger et al, , 2005. Recent research evaluating BST for teaching skills to prevent gun play illustrates the application of BST and procedures for enhancing generalization following the use of BST.…”

Utilization Analysis of a Pedestrian Safety Training Program

“…Third, will pedestrian safety skills generalize across time and settings when crossing guards administer training? If not, will remediation procedures (see Yeaton & Bailey, 1978) be effective? Fourth, will the large-scale implementation of preventive practices such as pedestrian safety training be associated with a decrease in the "bottom line" dependent variables, viz., pedestrian deaths and injuries (Yeaton, Greene, & Bailey, 1981)?…”

“…Page, Iwata, and Neef (1976) taught pedestrian safety skills to six retarded persons using individualized instruction by staff expert in behavioral training techniques. Yeaton and Bailey (1978) demonstrated the effectiveness of a pedestrian training package with small groups of normal children at two schools and presented individual data for each of the 24 students trained. The extension of this training program to much larger numbers of young children at many schools is a logical direction to proceed.…”

Comparison of Two Programs to Teach Firearm Injury Prevention Skills to 6- and 7-Year-Old Children

“…10,[16][17][18] In addition, a number of studies have documented that older children benefit more from safety skills training programs, compared with younger children, often scoring much higher on follow-up assessments. 17,[19][20][21] The generally lower performance of preschool-aged children, compared with school-aged children, is predicted by developmental theory, which suggests that children need to reach a particular developmental stage before they can achieve the most benefit from such training. 22 The current study involved a comparison of BST and the Eddie Eagle program implemented in a small-group format, similar to that used by Himle et al, 12 with school-aged children.…”