Children's peer assessment and self-disclosure in the presence of an educational robot

Research in education has long established how children mutually influence and support each other's learning trajectories, eventually leading to the development and widespread use of learning methods based on peer activities. In order to explore children's learning behavior in the presence of a robotic facilitator during a collaborative writing activity, we investigated how they assess their peers in two specific group learning situations: peer-tutoring and peer-learning. Our scenario comprises of a pair of children performing a collaborative activity involving the act of writing a word/letter on a tactile tablet. In the peer-tutoring condition, one child acts as the teacher and the other as the learner, while in the peer-learning condition, both children are learners without the attribution of any specific role. Our experiment includes 40 children in total (between 6 and 8 years old) over the two conditions, each time in the presence of a robot facilitator. Our results suggest that the peer-tutoring situation leads to significantly more corrective feedback being provided, as well as the children more disposed to self-disclosure to the robot.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Robots in the classroom: Learning to be a Good Tutor

To broaden the adoption and be more inclusive, robotic tutors need to tailor their behaviours to their audience. Traditional approaches, such as Bayesian Knowledge Tracing, try to adapt the content of lessons or the difficulty of tasks to the current estimated knowledge of the student. However, these variations only happen in a limited domain, predefined in advance, and are not able to tackle unexpected variation in a student's behaviours. We argue that robot adaptation needs to go beyond variations in preprogrammed behaviours and that robots should in effect learn online how to become better tutors. A study is currently being carried out to evaluate how human supervision can teach a robot to support child learning during an educational game using one implementation of this approach

Customer Responses to Service Robots – Comparing Human-Robot Interaction with Human-Human Interaction

This paper investigates how service failures affect customers by comparing human-robot interactions with human-human interactions. More specifically, it compares customers’ satisfaction in a service robot interaction depending on a service failure with the customers’ satisfaction in a frontline service employee interaction. On a theoretical basis, extant literature on the uncanny valley paradigm proposed that service robots would create lower satisfaction than human frontline employees would. However, I find that service robots could keep up with human frontline employees. Based on an extensive literature research on service failures, I propose that customer satisfaction after a service failure declines far less for a human frontline employee compared with a service robot. Nevertheless, I find evidence that service robots create even higher customer satisfaction than human frontline employees after the exactly similar service failure. I base my findings on an experimental laboratory study with 120 student participants and the service robot “Pepper” from Softbank Corp

Children’s Peer Assessment and Self-disclosure in the Presence of an Educational Robot

Research in education has long established how children mutually influence and support each other's learning trajectories, eventually leading to the development and widespread use of learning methods based on peer activities. In order to explore children's learning behavior in the presence of a robotic facilitator during a collaborative writing activity, we investigated how they assess their peers in two specific group learning situations: peer-tutoring and peer-learning. Our scenario comprises of a pair of children performing a collaborative activity involving the act of writing a word/letter on a tactile tablet. In the peer-tutoring condition, one child acts as the teacher and the other as the learner, while in the peer-learning condition, both children are learners without the attribution of any specific role. Our experiment includes 40 children in total (between 6 and 8 years old) over the two conditions, each time in the presence of a robot facilitator. Our results suggest that the peer-tutoring situation leads to significantly more corrective feedback being provided, as well as the children more disposed to self-disclosure to the robot