A Comparison of Social Robot to Tablet and Teacher in a New Script Learning Context

Abstract

This research occurred in a special context where Kazakhstan's recent decision to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin-based alphabet has resulted in challenges connected to teaching literacy, addressing a rare combination of research hypotheses and technical objectives about language learning. Teachers are not necessarily trained to teach the new alphabet, and this could result in a challenge for children with learning difficulties. Prior research studies in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) have proposed the use of a robot to teach handwriting to children (Hood et al., 2015; Lemaignan et al., 2016). Drawing on the Kazakhstani case, our study takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together smart solutions from robotics, computer vision areas, and educational frameworks, language, and cognitive studies that will benefit diverse groups of stakeholders. In this study, a human-robot interaction application is designed to help primary school children learn both a newly-adopted script and also its handwriting system. The setup involved an experiment with 62 children between the ages of 7-9 years old, across three conditions: a robot and a tablet, a tablet only, and a teacher. Based on the paradigm-learning by teaching-the study showed that children improved their knowledge of the Latin script by interacting with a robot. Findings reported that children gained similar knowledge of a new script in all three conditions without gender effect. In addition, children's likeability ratings and positive mood change scores demonstrate significant benefits favoring the robot over a traditional teacher and tablet only approaches.

Visual Neuropsychology in Development: Anatomo-Functional Brain Mechanisms of Action/Perception Binding in Health and Disease

“…Accordingly, the knowledge summarized here sustains the importance of adopting a systemic approach even in the evaluation of the impact of supposedly purely visual deficits, which indeed can affect also motor skills, cognition, social skills, and emotional processing. Addressing such a complexity is the fundamental requirement of current implementations of systemic approaches for visuallyrelated training in typical conditions or in response to visual disorders, including virtual reality (Adams et al, 2018;Choi et al, 2021), robotics (Mirkowski et al, 2019;Zhexenova et al, 2020), and touch screen technology (Aslam et al, 2016;Sheehan and Uttal, 2016;Dalecki et al, 2019).…”

Comparing a Robot Tutee to a Human Tutee in a Learning-By-Teaching Scenario with Children

“… Park et al, 2011 ; Serholt et al, 2014 ; Kennedy et al, 2016a ; Kory Westlund et al, 2017 ). Another study compared a robot tutee to a human teacher, as well as to a tablet-only condition ( Zhexenova et al, 2020 ). Chandra et al (2015) compared a robot facilitating a learning-by-teaching scenario between two children to a human facilitator.…”

Individual Differences in Children’s (Language) Learning Skills Moderate Effects of Robot-Assisted Second Language Learning

“…Current evidence on the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL), however, is mixed (see for reviews Kanero et al, 2018 ; van den Berghe et al, 2019 ), and there is inconclusive evidence on the possible benefits of robots over other forms of technology ( Han et al, 2008 ; Hyun et al, 2008 ; Leyzberg et al, 2012 ; Gordon et al, 2015 ; Kory Westlund et al, 2015 ; Zhexenova et al, 2020 ). Specific for word learning, positive effects of robots on learning were found in several single-session studies ( Tanaka and Matsuzoe, 2012 ; de Wit et al, 2018 ), while only moderate learning gains were found in multiple-session studies ( Kanda et al, 2004 ; Gordon et al, 2016 ).…”