Social Robots

Educators' Views on Using Humanoid Robots With Autistic Learners in Special Education Settings in England

“…The current findings suggest that autism educators at special schools in England have notably different expectations and priorities for humanoid robots than many existing HRI research projects, though share many points of agreement with other SEND and autism educators (Hughes-Roberts and Brown, 2015; Huijnen et al, 2017; though see Diep et al, 2015) and autism specialists working with other technologies (King et al, 2017). Educators expected that if they could access humanoid robots in the future, these would be flexible tools for them and their teams.…”

“…They expressed a willingness to find out more about them, or to try interacting with them for themselves to see what their capabilities might be. These respondents from autism education settings shared many basic perceptions of robots with both the mainstream, UK-based educators in Kennedy et al (2016), including robots as having "simplistic interactions" and being "primarily seen as a scripted, reactive machine" (p. 5), and with the Canada-based special educators in Diep et al (2015), who felt that robots might "[provide] structure and repetitiveness in a consistent fashion" (p. 2). Yet, the same qualities that our participants saw as potentially so promising for meeting the needs of autistic learners were perceived as obstacles to adoption by the Kennedy et al (2016) mainstream sample (see also Serholt et al, 2017); an illustration that "educators, " "autistic children" and "schools" are not homogenous groups and will have different needs-which need to be fully understood to inform future robotics work.…”

“…However, as with other robot characteristics, human-ness and social capacity were also perceived as pedagogically important (subthemes 3D, 4A). These concerns about overly close and important social relationships with robots are diametrically opposed to some of the Canadian special educators' opinions in Diep et al (2015), where "face-to-face interaction was seen as an important task they felt the robot could not provide" and that robots "cannot perform the task of providing emotional comfort or communication" (p. 2). These divergent views may indicate both differences of opinion between groups of educators, but also views of robots shifting over time (data from Diep et al were collected from six teachers in 2012) as technology becomes more sophisticated and is increasingly publicised.…”

“…Several studies have sought teachers and professionals' views to explore implementing robots within regular educational settings (Fridin and Belokopytov, 2014;Kennedy et al, 2016;Serholt et al, 2017;Cheng et al, 2018) but only a handful have done so within special education settings. Diep et al (2015) interviewed six teachers from a Canadian school for children with multiple and complex needs about their perceptions of social robots, in relation to an anticipatory governance framework (Guston, 2014). Although their results make some reference to autistic learners, they do not primarily focus on this group.…”

“…The findings from Hughes-Roberts and Brown (2015) and Huijnen et al (2016Huijnen et al ( , 2017 suggest that many educators seem to be broadly receptive-albeit cautious-toward at least some purposes of robots in autism or special education [though see (Diep et al, 2015), for more negative or mixed sentiments]. Educator interviews provide a valuable starting point for understanding whether and how robots might be integrated into existing educational practices, and might transition into being teacher-(not researcher-)managed tools.…”