How to Manage Affective State in Child-Robot Tutoring Interactions?

Schodde T, Hoffmann L, Kopp S. How to Manage Affective State in Child-Robot Tutoring Interactions? In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Companion Technology 2017. IEEE; 2017: 1-6.Social robots represent a fruitful enhancement of intelligent tutoring systems that can be used for one-to-one tutoring. The role of affective states during learning has so far only scarcely been considered in such systems, because it is unclear which cues should be tracked, how they should be interpreted, and how the system should react to them. Therefore, we conducted expert interviews with preschool teachers, and based on these results suggest a conceptual model for tracing and managing the affective state of preschool children during robot-child tutoring

Innovating Pedagogy 2015: Open University Innovation Report 4

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation

Gradient, UC3M

En este artículo se presenta un resumen de las líneas de investigación que se realizan en el Laboratorio Gradient perteneciente al Grupo GAST (Grupo de Aplicaciones y Servicios Telemáticos) del Departamento de Ingeniería Telemática de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. La temática principal de investigación es la aplicación de tecnologías para la mejora de la enseñanza y el aprendizaje. El resumen se centra en tres líneas: Personalización del aprendizaje, uso de dispositivos móviles con fines educativos y aplicaciones de Realidad Virtual y Realidad Aumentada en educación.En este artículo se presenta un resumen de las líneas de investigación que se realizan en el Laboratorio Gradient perteneciente al Grupo GAST (Grupo de Aplicaciones y Servicios Telemáticos) del Departamento de Ingeniería Telemática de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. La temática principal de investigación es la aplicación de tecnologías para la mejora de la enseñanza y el aprendizaje. El resumen se centra en tres líneas: Personalización del aprendizaje, uso de dispositivos móviles con fines educativos y aplicaciones de Realidad Virtual y Realidad Aumentada en educación.Publicad

Interventions to Regulate Confusion during Learning

Confusion provides opportunities to learn at deeper levels. However, learners must put forth the necessary effort to resolve their confusion to convert this opportunity into actual learning gains. Learning occurs when learners engage in cognitive activities beneficial to learning (e.g., reflection, deliberation, problem solving) during the process of confusion resolution. Unfortunately, learners are not always able to resolve their confusion on their own. The inability to resolve confusion can be due to a lack of knowledge, motivation, or skills. The present dissertation explored methods to aid confusion resolution and ultimately promote learning through a multi-pronged approach. First, a survey revealed that learners prefer more information and feedback when confused and that they preferred different interventions for confusion compared to boredom and frustration. Second, expert human tutors were found to most frequently handle learner confusion by providing direct instruction and responded differently to learner confusion compared to anxiety, frustration, and happiness. Finally, two experiments were conducted to test the effectiveness of pedagogical and motivational confusion regulation interventions. Both types of interventions were investigated within a learning environment that experimentally induced confusion via the presentation of contradictory information by two animated agents (tutor and peer student agents). Results showed across both studies that learner effort during the confusion regulation task impacted confusion resolution and that learning occurred when the intervention provided the opportunity for learners to stop, think, and deliberate about the concept being discussed. Implications for building more effective affect-sensitive learning environments are discussed

Integrating Socially Assistive Robots into Language Tutoring Systems. A Computational Model for Scaffolding Young Children's Foreign Language Learning

Schodde T. Integrating Socially Assistive Robots into Language Tutoring Systems. A Computational Model for Scaffolding Young Children's Foreign Language Learning. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2019.Language education is a global and important issue nowadays, especially for young children since their later educational success build on it. But learning a language is a complex task that is known to work best in a social interaction and, thus, personalized sessions tailored to the individual knowledge and needs of each child are needed to allow for teachers to optimally support them. However, this is often costly regarding time and personnel resources, which is one reasons why research of the past decades investigated the benefits of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). But although ITSs can help out to provide individualized one-on-one tutoring interactions, they often lack of social support. This dissertation provides new insights on how a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) can be employed as a part of an ITS, building a so-called "Socially Assistive Robot Tutoring System" (SARTS), to provide social support as well as to personalize and scaffold foreign language learning for young children in the age of 4-6 years. As basis for the SARTS a novel approach called A-BKT is presented, which allows to autonomously adapt the tutoring interaction to the children's individual knowledge and needs. The corresponding evaluation studies show that the A-BKT model can significantly increase student's learning gains and maintain a higher engagement during the tutoring interaction. This is partly due to the models ability to simulate the influences of potential actions on all dimensions of the learning interaction, i.e., the children's learning progress (cognitive learning), affective state, engagement (affective learning) and believed knowledge acquisition (perceived learning). This is particularly important since all dimensions are strongly interconnected and influence each other, for example, a low engagement can cause bad learning results although the learner is already quite proficient. However, this also yields the necessity to not only focus on the learner's cognitive learning but to equally support all dimensions with appropriate scaffolding actions. Therefore an extensive literature review, observational video recordings and expert interviews were conducted to find appropriate actions applicable for a SARTS to support each learning dimension. The subsequent evaluation study confirms that the developed scaffolding techniques are able to support young children’s learning process either by re-engaging them or by providing transparency to support their perception of the learning process and to reduce uncertainty. Finally, based on educated guesses derived from the previous studies, all identified strategies are integrated into the A-BKT model. The resulting model called ProTM is evaluated by simulating different learner types, which highlight its ability to autonomously adapt the tutoring interactions based on the learner's answers and provided dis-engagement cues. Summarized, this dissertation yields new insights into the field of SARTS to provide personalized foreign language learning interactions for young children, while also rising new important questions to be studied in the future

A Framework for Digital Emotions

As new media become more ubiquitous, our emotional experiences in digital space are increasing exponentially as well. While there is much talk of “affective” computing and “affective” new media art, a disconnect exists between networked emotions and the popular media that they inhabit. This research presents a theoretical framework for assessing “digital emotions”—a term that describes the feedback process between digital technologies and the body with respect to short, networked inscriptions of emotion and the (re)experience of those inscriptions within the body and through digital space. Digital emotions display five basic characteristics that can be applied to a variety of media environments: (1) They describe a process of feedback that link short, emotive inscriptions in digital environments to users and their (re)experiences of those inscriptions; (2) This feedback process includes, but is not limited to, the inscriber, the medium, and the receiver and the emotive experience fuels the initial connectivity and any further connectivity; (3) The emotional value varies depending on the media, the community of users, and the aesthetic experience of the digital emotion; (4) Digital emotions influence our emotional repertoire by normalizing our paradigm scenarios; and (5) They are highly malleable based on changes in technologies and their ability to both expand and contract emotional experiences in real time. The core characteristics of digital emotions are applied to three broad and overlapping categories: technology, community, and aesthetic experience. Each of these aspects of digital emotions work together, yet they exist along the massive spectrum of our online, emotional experiences—from our casual click of the “like” button to digital community artworks. Applied to digital spaces along this spectrum, digital emotions illuminate the feedback process that occurs between the media, the network, and the environment. The framework ultimately suggests that the process of digital emotions explicates emotions experiences that could only occur in digital space and are therefore unique to digital culture