Pedestrian behaviour of 6th grade Estonian students: Implications of social factors and accident-prevention education at school

Children as pedestrians are one of the most vulnerable groups of road users. Therefore factors associated with risky pedestrian behaviour should be carefully studied. The aim of this article is to clarify how the traffic behaviour of 6th grade students as pedestrians is associated with the behaviour of their traffic companions and prevention activities at school, also taking gender into consideration. The research was conducted based on a randomly-selected sample of 1033 6th-grade students with the mean age of 12.77 ± 0.38 (SD) years. The results showed that compared to girls boys take significantly more risks as pedestrians: they rarely use reflectors during periods of darkness and often cross the road against the red light. The most important role models for adolescents in traffic behaviour are their parents. The role model behaviour with the strongest effect on adolescent high-risk behaviour in traffic is the role model not using crosswalks to cross the street. The results also showed that higher-risk traffic behaviour by adolescent pedestrians is predicted by higher-risk behaviour on the part of their companions (parents, teachers), walking alone on the street, as well as by an adolescent’s lower involvement in the less active prevention activities in the classroom. To improve adolescent pedestrians’ traffic behaviour social environment and school-based factors should be considered more thoroughly in prevention work at school.     

The development of prospective memory in young schoolchildren: The impact of ongoing task absorption,cue salience,and cue centrality

This study presents evidence that 9- and 10-year-old children outperform 6- and 7-year-old children on a measure of event-based prospective memory and that retrieval-based factors systematically influence performance and age differences. All experiments revealed significant age effects in prospective memory even after controlling for ongoing task performance. In addition, the provision of a less absorbing ongoing task (Experiment 1), higher cue salience (Experiment 2), and cues appearing in the center of attention (Experiment 3) were each associated with better performance. Of particular developmental importance was an age by cue centrality (in or outside of the center of attention) interaction that emerged in Experiment 3. Thus, age effects were restricted to prospective memory cues appearing outside of the center of attention, suggesting that the development of prospective memory across early school years may be modulated by whether a cue requires overt monitoring beyond the immediate attentional context. Because whether a cue is in or outside of the center of attention might determine the amount of executive control needed in a prospective memory task, findings suggest that developing executive control resources may drive prospective memory development across primary school age.