In its evaluation of the effectiveness of driver education as taught in secondary and commercial schools, this report (1) investigates the objectives of driver education, (2) determines what is presently known about its effectiveness through a review of previous evaluative research, (3) discusses what driver education is likely/unlikely to accomplish, and (4) specifies cost-effective directions for future research by priority. To provide a framework against which the research was considered, Section II divides the objectives into two groups, conceptual and procedural, and discusses the two main flaws in the methodology of previous studies: the characteristics of course participants and the instruments used to measure their performance. The conceptual objectives in the first part of Section III include acquisition of the principles of driving and the development of safe driving attitudes; the procedural objectives in the second part of this section relate to performance measurement judged in terms of road tests (intermediate criteria) and the number of accidents and violations (ultimate criteria). For each objective this section gives a definition and then evaluates the research methodology and its inherent limitations. Since none of the studies thus assessed is found to give definitive information about the effectiveness of driver education, Section IV examines two ongoing programs that seem well-designed and suggests new directions for research efforts. Besides an annotated bibliography, this document contains in two appendixes tables summarizing evaluation research and statistics on fatalities among young drivers. (ELG)