Section 2: Teaching to recognize Uncertainty - Page
12 of 13 Self-Study Guide | OUTLINE | INDEX | Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 |Section 5 | REVIEW |
It might be helpful to stop and reflect on all that you've learned in this Section, so let's review the process for teaching students to recognize Situations of Uncertainty.
To make this outline of the process complete, we'll also include analyzing the risk of crossing. even though that will not be covered until the next section.
The purpose of this training is to develop students' ability to:
- intuitively determine if the warning times of approaching vehicles are longer or shorter than their crossing time;
- determine if they are in a Situation of Uncertainty after observing a number of approaching vehicles;
- analyze the risk of crossing in Situations of Uncertainty, and consider alternatives when the risk is not acceptable.
Before beginning this training, make sure your students:
MATERIALS:
VIDEO OF PROCESS:
A number of you have asked for a video that illustrates the training procedure, so the video on this page shows the process and how the various checklists can be used to document it.
I am extremely grateful to
- Jolene Troisi and
- Josh Kingsbury
-- their collaboration is what made this video possible!
TRAINING PROCEDURE
- Take students to a street that is suitable for this training, then determine their crossing time for traffic from the left and from the right.
- Help students develop an intuitive understanding of their crossing time for the first half of the street and for the entire street by visualizing themselves walking across and estimating when they would complete their crossing, until they are reliably accurate
(details here).
- Once they have an intuitive understanding of their crossing time, have them learn to compare the warning times of approaching vehicles with the crossing time:
- Ask students to wait until it is quiet/(they see nothing coming) and then tell you when they first think they hear/(see) something that MIGHT be a vehicle coming.
- Start the timer when they detect the vehicle, and stop it when the vehicle arrives. Do not report the result to the student yet, but record or remember it.
- Ask the student if s/he thinks the warning time (detection-to-arrival time) for that vehicle was longer or shorter than the crossing time.
Make sure the student is basing this judgement on an intuitive understanding of crossing time, rather than counting seconds.
- After the student guesses, report the time that was measured with the stopwatch, and let the student know if s/he was correct or not.
- REPEAT these four steps, using a stopwatch to provide feedback, until your student becomes reliably accurate at comparing warning times with crossing time.
- If the student keeps making mistakes and misjudging whether the warning time of a vehicle is longer than the crossing time, review his or her intuitive understanding of crossing time again, then resume comparing warning times of approaching vehicles to crossing time until s/he becomes reliably accurate.
- ASSESS SITUATION: After listening to/(watching) enough vehicles to observe the range of warning times for vehicles approaching from the right and from the left in that situation, discuss with the student whether it is a Situation of Uncertainty or a Situation of Confidence (the principles and flow chart may help guide that discussion).
- Finally, in each Situation of Uncertainty, use the Risk Analysis Checklist to have the student:
- Assess the risk,
- Decide if the risk is acceptable, and
- Consider alternatives.
- REPEAT! Take the students to a variety of crossing situations and ask them to independently assess whether it is a Situation of Uncertainty or not, based on their observation of the traffic and their estimate of the width of the street (using their intuitive understanding).
If it is a Situation of Uncertainty, the student analyzes the risk, decides if the risk is acceptable and if not, considers and implements alternatives.
Continue this practice until the students become skilled and accurate with their assessments of the situations, including at least one Situation of Uncertainty and one Situation of Confidence.