Abstract
A pedestrian safety educational program was presented to a total of 4,305 students ranging from kindergarten through 8th grade at 16 participating schools in Detroit, Michigan, between May 2008 and January 2009. The goal of the educational program was to improve student awareness of proper pedestrian behavior and street-crossing techniques, which the authors hypothesized would result in proper street-crossing behavior. This study improves on methodologies used in previous studies by performing an objective evaluation of the program's effectiveness, considering both message comprehension and natural street-crossing behavior of students at the schools where the program was implemented. Two measures of effectiveness were used for the program evaluation: (a) violation rate for child pedestrians observed before and after presentation of the program and (b) correct response rate obtained from written tests given before and after implementation. A total of 4,835 child pedestrians were observed during field data collection performed at 10 of the 16 schools. The child pedestrian violation rates were found to decrease in the after period at nine of the 10 schools where data were collected, with an overall decrease in violation rate of 4.44%, which was statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. Significant increases in the percentage of correct responses between the pre- and posttests were also observed at each of the schools and for all grade levels with the exception of kindergarten. The overall increase in correct response rate between the pre- and posttests was 23.2%, which was statistically significant.
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