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

Abstract

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.