Learning road safety skills in the classroom

Accessible summary•  It is important for some disabled children to learn road safety skills. •  Practicing crossing the road in the classroom with photographs of the outside road helped a young disabled child improve his road safety skills. •  Improved road safety skills helped the child to be more independent and aware when crossing roads.Summary This case study demonstrates the effectiveness of a classroom based learning programme in the acquisition of road safety skills. The participant, a child with severe learning disabilities, was taught road safety behaviours in the classroom with the aid of photograph cards. When he had mastered these skills in the classroom, he returned to the outdoor environment and showed higher levels of road safety competence than before the classroom training. The study also describes the generalisation of the road safety skills over time and with different support staff. The benefits of learning complex community skills in the classroom with simplified environmental stimuli (i.e. picture cards rather than in vivo ) are discussed.