What are the consequences of sharing a trainee's driving course between different trainers?

In some driving schools in France, several trainers may successively train a single trainee. This situation can be described as a case of asynchronous collaboration. In this paper, we examine the consequences of this situation in two different studies: the first explores the trainers' activity while the second concerns the trainees.

The participants in the first study were 6 trainers with different levels of experience, each working with 2 different trainees. Four of them met their trainees for the very first time. The second study included 150 trainees from 13 driving schools in Paris.

In the first study, the driving lessons were recorded and fully transcribed before a thematic analysis was conducted. In the second study, the trainees completed a questionnaire. We collected both socio-demographic and driver training data.

In the first study, we observed that changing trainers during a trainee's driving course had an impact on the trainers' activity. We identified difficulties in establishing a diagnosis of the trainee's progress, and the organization of the driving lesson was altered. The second study highlighted the fact that changing trainers at the beginning of a course increased the duration of the training period.

The impacts of changing trainers during a trainee's driving course are discussed with regard to both the trainers' scaffolding activity and the trainees' skill development.