Charisi, Vasiliki

Davison, Daniel Patrick

Evers, Vanessa

Reidsma, Dennis

van der Meij, Jan

Wijnen, Frances Martine

English

This paper presents preliminary results of a study which assesses the impact a social robot might have on the verbalization of a child’s internal reasoning and knowledge while working on a learning task. In a comparative experiment we offered children the context of either a social robot or an interactive tablet for verbally explaining their thoughts, while keeping the content of the learning task identical. Results suggest the context of a social robot leads to a faster response time from the children

University of Twente Research Information

Inquiry learning with a social robot: can you explain that to me?Frances Wijnena, Vicky Charisib, Daniel Davisonb, Jan van der Meija, Dennis Reidsmab, Vanessa EversbaFaculty of Behavioural Management and Social Sciences, ELAN, University of Twente, The NetherlandsbDept. of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, HMI, University of Twente, The NetherlandsAbstract. This paper presents preliminary results of a study whichassesses the impact a social robot might have on the verbalizationof a child’s internal reasoning and knowledge while working on alearning task. In a comparative experiment we offered children thecontext of either a social robot or an interactive tablet for verballyexplaining their thoughts, while keeping the content of the learningtask identical. Results suggest the context of a social robot leads toa faster response time from the children.Keywords: Social robot, child-robot interaction, inquiry learning,verbalization, interactive explainingINTRODUCTIONTalking with other people can provide a context for ar-ticulating and explaining ideas. This can facilitate greaterunderstanding of ones own ideas en knowledge. For the past 15years, research has proved that generating explanations leadsto deeper understanding when learning new things [1], [2],[3]. There are two forms of explaining: (1) explaining thesubject of interest to oneself, which is called self-explainingand (2) explaining the learned subject to another person,which is called interactive explaining [9]. Several studies haveprovided successful examples of self-explanation activities [1],[11]. However, a social partner may implicitly create moreopportunities for explanations, which are difficult to trigger inthe case of self-explanation.The role of a partner can range from being a passive one,who just listens, to an interactive one who provides supportand feedback to the learner [3]. Although there are somesimilarities between an activity with a partner who just listensand self-explanation activities, the presence of another personcan provide the benefit of an audience effect [3]. Generatingexplanations to another person has been associated with theconstruction of knowledge [8], [10]. This is because theaddition of a social partner might lead to more verbalization ofreasoning and explanations, which relates to the developmentof metacognitive skills.This study investigates the effect of a social robot onthe explanatory behavior of young children when workingon an inquiry learning task. Inquiry learning is based onconstructivism, which we have combined with aspects of thesocio-cultural theory about collaborative learning [12]. Thischoice was based on the following arguments: (1) inquirylearning provides an open-ended task, (2) the collaborativeaspect provides a clear role for the robot as a peer learner, (3)children can use different strategies in operating inquiry tasksThis project has received funding from the European Union SeventhFramework Programme (FP7-ICT-2013-10) as part of EASEL under grantagreement no 611971.and the verbalization of these strategies can provide insightsin the way children approach such tasks.Inquiry learning is often described as a cycle or spiralthat involves several processes. Klahr’s [5], [6] ScientificDiscovery of Dual Search (SDDS) model identifies hypothesisgeneration, experimentation, and evidence evaluation as thecore processes of scientific inquiry learning [7], [4], [13]. Inthe phases of hypothesis generation and evidence evaluationthe child has the most opportunities for verbalization of his/herthought process.DESIGNThe purpose of the present study is to assess the effect of asocial robot on the verbalization of reasoning and knowledgeduring a collaborative inquiry task. The inquiry task focusedon exploring the phenomenon of balance using a balancebeam. The study employed a between-subjects design withtwo conditions. In the first condition, children performedthe balance inquiry task together with an expressive socialrobot, the RoboKind Zeno R25. The robot was presented asa peer but with well-developed inquiry skills. Futhermore, thechildren received a tablet. Through this tablet the childrencould indicate they wanted to move on to the next assignmentor ask for additional help. In the second condition, childrenperformed an identical inquiry task about balance with a tabletonly. The tablet provided the same assignments, suggestionsand questions. In both conditions the robot or tablet would askthe child to verbally explain their hypothesis and conclusionat the specific stages in the inquiry task.It was hypothesized that the presence of a social robot wouldtrigger children to give more explanations than with the tablet.Furthermore, in the robot condition it was expected that thetime between asking a question and the childs response wasshorter than in the tablet condition.Participants were 12 Dutch elementary school students(33.3% female) with an average age of 8.8 years (SD =2.1). The students were randomly assigned to either the robotcondition (n = 6), or the tablet condition (n = 6). A review ofschool curricula showed that students were not yet educatedin the phenomena of balance. Therefore, it was expected thatthe students had little or no prior knowledge.METHODThis experiment focuses on measuring the duration ofverbalization and the response time of a child’s response toquestions from the system. Both measures were assessed fromvideos recorded during the sessions, which were annotated onthree levels.Proceedings New Friends 2015 - The 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education-  24  -The first level was child speech and contained one label:verbalization. This label was used when children providedexplanations about the assignment or balance and was useddirectly to assess the duration.The second level was system speech and contained threelabels: (1) giving explanation, this label was used when thesystem (robot or tablet) would give an explanation or a verbalresponse to the child or answer of the child, (2) askingquestion, this label was used when the system would statea question, and (3) waiting for response, this label was usedwhen the system had stated a questions and was waiting for aresponse of the child, effectively measuring the response time.The third level was child actions and contained two labels:(1) interacting with balance, this label was used when thechildren were working with the balance, for example placingor removing pots or removing the wooden blocks, (2) pressingbutton, this label was used when the child would press one ofthe button of the tablet (in both conditions).Future work will investigate the remaining annotation levels,however this paper focuses on reporting the duration andresponse time as discussed above.RESULTSIn total 149 annotations were identified for the label verbal-ization of which 77 annotations refer to the robot conditionand 72 annotations to the tablet condition. The total durationfor all annotations with this label was 758.11 seconds (SD= 4.20). The mean duration for the robot condition was 5.80(SD = 4.94). The mean duration for the tablet condition was4.32 (SD = 3.09). An independent sample t-test showed nosignificant difference between both conditions concerning theduration, t = 1.264 (df = 10), p = .118 (one-tailed).The label waiting for response was annotated 146 timesof which 71 annotations refer to the robot condition and 75annotations to the tablet condition. The total duration for allannotations with this label was 217.22 seconds (SD = 2.79).The mean duration of this label in the robot condition was .94(SD = 1.14) and 2.00 (SD = 3.67) for the tablet condition.An independent sample t-test showed a significant differencebetween both conditions concerning the response time, t = -2.54 (df = 10), p = .015 (one-tailed).CONCLUSIONThis study investigated the effect of a social robot on theduration of verbalization and the response time to questionsin the context of an inquiry-learning task. To assess this effectthe social robot was compared with the use of a tablet. Itwas hypothesized that providing the children with the contextof a social robot would lead to more verbalization about thetask than when the children would only use a tablet. Resultsindicated that children in the robot condition verbalized morethan children in the tablet condition but this difference wasnot significant. The second hypothesis concerned the responsetime of children when a question was asked. The resultsshowed a significant difference between the robot conditionand the tablet condition in favor of the robot condition.It seems that children verbalized more easily (shorter re-sponse time) when a social robot was used compared to atablet, but not necessarily more extensively. However, thesample was very small (n = 6 per condition) and a largersample with more participants may provide more information.FUTURE WORKFor our future work we want to repeat this experimentwith a larger sample in order to increase the external validity.Furthermore, for the repeated study we are planning to performa qualitative analysis of the answers children give to the ques-tions in order to gain insight in the reasoning of children. Sincethis experiment was done in the context of inquiry learning, thereasoning of children might give us some interesting insightsin what they have learned from the experiment and whetherthere is a difference in learning between the participants in thetablet condition compared to the robot condition.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis project has received funding from the European UnionSeventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2013-10) as part ofEASEL under grant agreement no 611971.REFERENCES1. M. T. Chi, M. M. Bassok, M. W. Lewis, P. Reimann, and R. Glaser.Self-Explanations: How Students Study and Use Examples in Learningto Solve Problems. Cognitive Science, 13(2):145–182, Apr. 1989.2. E. B. Coleman, A. L. Brown, and I. D. Rivkin. The Effect of InstructionalExplanations on Learning From Scientific Texts. Journal of the LearningSciences, 6(4):347–365, Oct. 1997.3. J. Holmes. Designing agents to support learning by explaining. Comput-ers & Education, 48(4):523–547, May 2007.4. W. R. V. Joolingen and T. D. Jong. An extended dual search space modelof scientific discovery learning. Instructional Science, 25(5):307–346,1997.5. D. Klahr. Exploring Science: The Cognition and Development ofDiscovery Processes. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000.6. D. Klahr and K. Dunbar. Dual Space Search During Scientific Reasoning.Cognitive Science, 12(1):1–48, Jan. 1988.7. A. W. Lazonder. Handbook of Research on Educational Communicationsand Technology. pages 453–464, 2014.8. V. Manion and J. M. Alexander. The Benefits of Peer Collaboration onStrategy Use, Metacognitive Causal Attribution, and Recall. Journal ofExperimental Child Psychology, 67(2):268–289, Nov. 1997.9. R. Ploetzner, P. Dillenbourg, M. Preier, and D. Traum. Learning byexplaining to oneself and to others. Collaborative-learning: Cognitiveand Computational Approaches, pages 103–121, 1999.10. S. D. Teasley. The role of talk in children’s peer collaborations.Developmental Psychology, 31(2):207–220, 1995.11. K. VanLehn and R. Jones. Learning by explaining examples to oneself:A computational model. In S. Chipman and A. L. Meyrowitz, editors,Foundations of Knowledge Acquisition: Cognitive Models of ComplexLearning, volume 194, pages 25–82. Springer USA, Boston, MA, 1993.12. L. Vygotsky. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher PsychologicalProcesses. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978.13. C. Zimmerman. The Development of Scientific Reasoning Skills. Devel-opmental Review, 20(1):99–149, Mar. 2000.Proceedings New Friends 2015 - The 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education-  25  -

Inquiry learning with a social robot: can you explain that to me?

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Inquiry learning with a social robot: can you explain that to me?

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