Child development and the aims of road safety education

Pedestrian accidents are one of the most prominent causes of premature injury, handicap and death in the modern world. In children, the problem is so severe that pedestrian accidents are widely regarded as the most serious of all health risks facing children in developed countries. Not surprisingly, educational measures have long been advocated as a means of teaching children how to cope with traffic and substantial resources have been devoted to their development and provision. Unfortunately, there seems to be a widespread view at the present time that education has not achieved as much as had been hoped and that there may even be quite strict limits to what can be achieved through education. This would, of course, shift the emphasis away from education altogether towards engineering or urban planning measures aimed at creating an intrinsically safer environment in which the need for education might be reduced or even eliminated. However, whilst engineering measures undoubtedly have a major role to play in the effort to reduce accidents, this outlook is both overly optimistic about the benefits of engineering and overly pessimistic about the limitations of education. At the same time, a fresh analysis is clearly required both of the aims and methods of contemporary road safety education. The present report is designed to provide such an analysis and to establish a framework within which further debate and research can take place

Influence of virtual reality training on the roadside crossing judgements of child pedestrians

The roadside crossing judgments of children aged 7, 9, and 11 years were assessed relative to controls before and after training with a computer-simulated traffic environment. Trained children crossed more quickly, and their estimated crossing times became better aligned with actual crossing times. They crossed more promptly, missed fewer safe opportunities to cross, accepted smaller traffic gaps without increasing the number of risky crossings, and showed better conceptual understanding of the factors to be considered when making crossing judgments. All age groups improved to the same extent, and there was no deterioration when children were retested 8 months later. The results are discussed in relation to theoretical arguments concerning the extent to which children's pedestrian judgments are amenable to training

The Generationing of Power: A Comparison of Child-Parent and Sibling Relations in Scotland

The paper concentrates on an exploration of power relations within families. The paper discusses parental power in relation to legitimacy, household resources and children’s anticipated reactions of adult discipline. The nature of sibling power is highlighted before exploring the reciprocal expectations of sibling and child-parent interactions. The paper ends by suggesting that the generationing of power relations can lead to differing degrees of backstage and frontstage performances within the home

Search for heavy lepton partners of neutrinos in proton-proton collisions in the context of the type III seesaw mechanism

This is the Pre-print version of the Article. The official publishe version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierA search is presented in proton–proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7TeV for fermionic triplet states expected in type III seesaw models. The search is performed using final states with three isolated charged leptons and an imbalance in transverse momentum. The data, collected with the CMS detector at the LHC, correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.9 fb−1. No excess of events is observed above the background predicted by the standard model, and the results are interpreted in terms of limits on production cross sections and masses of the heavy partners of the neutrinos in type III seesaw models. Depending on the considered scenarios, lower limits are obtained on the mass of the heavy partner of the neutrino that range from 180 to 210 GeV. These are the first limits on the production of type III seesaw fermionic triplet states reported by an experiment at the LHC.This study is spported by the BMWF and FWF (Austria); FNRS and FWO (Belgium); CNPq, CAPES, FAPERJ, and FAPESP (Brazil); MEYS (Bulgaria); CERN; CAS, MoST, and NSFC (China); COLCIENCIAS (Colombia); MSES (Croatia); RPF (Cyprus); MoER, SF0690030s09 and ERDF (Estonia); Academy of Finland, MEC, and HIP (Finland); CEA and CNRS/IN2P3 (France); BMBF, DFG, and HGF (Germany); GSRT (Greece); OTKA and NKTH (Hungary); DAE and DST (India); IPM (Iran); SFI (Ireland); INFN (Italy); NRF and WCU (Korea); LAS (Lithuania); CINVESTAV, CONACYT, SEP, and UASLP-FAI (Mexico); MSI (New Zealand); PAEC (Pakistan); MSHE and NSC (Poland); FCT (Portugal); JINR (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan); MON, RosAtom, RAS and RFBR (Russia); MSTD (Serbia); SEIDI and CPAN (Spain); Swiss Funding Agencies (Switzerland); NSC (Taipei); ThEP, IPST and NECTEC (Thailand); TUBITAK and TAEK (Turkey); NASU (Ukraine); STFC (United Kingdom); DOE and NSF (USA). Individuals have received support from the Marie-Curie programme and the European Research Council (European Union); the Leventis Foundation; the A. P. Sloan Foundation; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office; the Fonds pour la Formation a la Recherche dans l’Industrie et dans l’Agriculture (FRIA-Belgium); the Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie (IWT-Belgium); the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS) of Czech Republic; the Council of Science and Industrial Research, India; the Compagnia di San Paolo (Torino); and the HOMING PLUS programme of Foundation for Polish Science, cofinanced from European Union, Regional Development Fund

Mixed-age effects in childrens social interactions

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Children's understanding of drivers' intentions

To become more skilled as pedestrians, children need to acquire a view of the traffic environment as one in which road users are active agents with different intentions and objectives. This paper describes a simulation study designed to explore children's understanding of drivers' intentions. It also investigated the effect of training children's sensitivity, through peer discussion and adult guidance, to the cues by which drivers signal their intentions. Results confirmed that children's ability to accurately predict drivers' intentions improves with age and that sensitizing children through training to the options for action available to drivers when signalling a manoeuvre improves their accuracy in predicting drivers' intentions. Training was also found to shift children's focus from contextual infrastructural features of the traffic environment (e.g. traffic signals, stop signs) by which to judge drivers' likely intentions to the explicit cues that drivers use to signal their imminent actions (e.g. slowing down, moving into the kerb). Training on the simulation was also shown to transfer to practical decision making at the roadside

Process variables in peer tutoring Childrens understandings of misunderstanding

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