Can Social Robots Effectively Elicit Curiosity in STEM Topics from K-1 Students During Oral Assessments?
This addresses the problem of engaging young children in STEM education through social robots, though it is incremental as it builds on existing assessment methods.
The study investigated whether social robots could effectively administer oral assessments and stimulate curiosity in STEM among K-1 students, finding no significant differences in speech production metrics compared to human assessors and successfully eliciting curiosity in robotics from many participants.
This paper presents the results of a pilot study that introduces social robots into kindergarten and first-grade classroom tasks. This study aims to understand 1) how effective social robots are in administering educational activities and assessments, and 2) if these interactions with social robots can serve as a gateway into learning about robotics and STEM for young children. We administered a commonly-used assessment (GFTA3) of speech production using a social robot and compared the quality of recorded responses to those obtained with a human assessor. In a comparison done between 40 children, we found no significant differences in the student responses between the two conditions over the three metrics used: word repetition accuracy, number of times additional help was needed, and similarity of prosody to the assessor. We also found that interactions with the robot were successfully able to stimulate curiosity in robotics, and therefore STEM, from a large number of the 164 student participants.