An evaluation of an airline cabin safety education program for elementary school children

• Custom cabin safety education course improves both safety knowledge and attitude.
• Demographics such as gender and grade in school affect degree of understanding.
• Elementary school students more easily understood the content presented in a lecture with direct instructor interaction than in a film.

The knowledge, attitude, and behavior intentions of elementary school students about airline cabin safety before and after they took a specially designed safety education course were examined.A safety education program was designed for school-age children based on the cabin safety briefings airlines given to their passengers, as well as on lessons learned from emergency evacuations. The course is presented in three modes: a lecture, a demonstration, and then a film. A two-step survey was used for this empirical study: an illustrated multiple-choice questionnaire before the program, and, upon completion, the same questionnaire to assess its effectiveness.Before the program, there were significant differences in knowledge and attitude based on school locations and the frequency that students had traveled by air. After the course, students showed significant improvement in safety knowledge, attitude, and their behavior intention toward safety. Demographic factors, such as gender and grade, also affected the effectiveness of safety education. The study also showed that having the instructor directly interact with students by lecturing is far more effective than presenting the information using only video media.A long-term evaluation, the effectiveness of the program, using TV or video accessible on the Internet to deliver a cabin safety program, and a control group to eliminate potential extraneous factors are suggested for future studies.