| Summary |
Chiu, Mei-Chen, 2008.07
Department of Transportation Technology and Management National Chiao Tung University
School children experience high traffic accident risk due to their lack of safe koowledge and self-protection ability. Nowadays, many countries devote to promote the Walk-to-School program; however, whether the children have enough abilities to face the complicated road environments is doubted. Through the literature review to conclude the abilities that child have to have, including switching attention, concentration, risk perception and roadway crossing abilities and design questionnaire to collects a set of valuable information based on the operational definition. To conquer the dispute about explaining and reasoning the results of traditional methods that uses the ordinal scale as interval scale, the study tries to measure children walking abilities by Item Response Theory to get more real abilities of children. The Item Response Theory includes unidimensional, consecutive and multimensional models. The study uses three models to measure ablilties and compare the statistic of goodness-of-fit and reliability of three models to get the best model of the study.
The study interviews the 9-11 years studends. Classifying contries and counties into three categories and sampling based on the number of elementary students of each category. The study collects 2453 samples from 10 schools. Then, exploring children’s switching attention, concentration, risk perception and roadway crossing abilities and their correlations by Item Response Theory and comparing the results with traditional methods. Furthermore, the study uses one-way ANOVA and regression to discuss the influence of school and parental traffic safety education on the walking ability.
The results can suppy to traffic safety education designer to design the suitable education, allow the teachers and parents to know children’s lack of knowledge and skills and establish the best strategy to improve children walking abilities. Further, the study provides more information about abilities, the parents and teachers can train their children in different ways according to how much abilities the children have already had. Finally, both school and parental traffic safety education influence children walking abilities, but the influence level is different. So the study suggests that the parental education should focus on training switching attention and concentration abilities; school education should focus on training risk perception and roadway crossing abilities. |
