Research report - 'Lifeskills - Learning for Living'

Prior to this report, there was little research done on the efficiency of this kind of facility in teaching skills usually not taught in a school or classroom environment. The other facility with a similar purpose is located in Maryland and little analysis of the processes has been undertaken. The main success of the Maryland program was "the provision of a distinct site which could deliver the program to large numbers of children, the teaching of practical skills which could not be readily taught at school and the development of good communication between children and safety departments."

Research report 187
This research is "An evaluation of the Lifeskills-Learning for Living program" from 2001-2003. The research has been undertaken by an outside party removing in possibility of bias in evaluating the results.
In this particular case, the Children are between the ages of 10 and 11. "The evaluation tested children's safety knowledge immediately after their visit to Life skills and also three months and 12 months later. Their self-confidence and performance on safety skills were also assessed either at the Life skills centre or at a different site three months after their visit." The data was collection through three different means; "paper and pencil questionnaire, observations of children completing specific tasks and focus group discussions. "

Results
"The Year 6 data showed that, three months after a visit to Lifeskills, children were more
knowledgeable and performed better than the Control children in all areas studied (Home safety, Fire safety, First aid, Road safety, and Drugs), and on all tests in these areas, except for two of the three Road safety tests - seat belt and pedestrian visibility A year later, in Year 7, the Lifeskills children were still more knowledgeable about Home safety, Fire safety and Road safety although not on as many tests as they were previously. The Lifeskills children were no longer more knowledgeable than the Control children about First Aid and Drugs.

The children’s confidence in dealing with emergencies was assessed by how quickly they started
to act on the performance tests and by their response to direct questions about their confidence on the paper and pencil tests. The Lifeskills children were more confident than the Control children on both measures. Their confidence, as measured by speed of reaction, was entirely appropriate since the Lifeskills children who were quicker to react were the ones who performed the task better."



"A limitation of the current evaluation is that due to time constraints during school visits, only half of Lifeskills’ scenarios could be assessed. Thus it is not possible to comment on children’s
acquisition of skill and knowledge in the other safety areas the programme sets out to cover. Also of course the performance measures involved role-playing rather than observing the children dealing with genuinely hazardous or life-threatening events. Nevertheless these role-playing performance tasks are a fuller test of the children’s successful acquisition of safety skills than the paper and pencil tests in the current evaluation or the measures used in some other evaluations which rely solely on the opinions of users of an intervention to assess the intervention’s effectiveness. The performance tests in the current evaluation require the children to “do” rather than merely to “say” what they would or should do. They are therefore likely to be better predictors of children’s responses in a real-life emergency."


Source: http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrhtm/rr187.htm
RR187 - An evaluation of the Lifeskills - Learning for Living programme