Impact of Interaction Context on the Student Affect-Learning Relationship in Child-Robot Interaction
Prior work in affect-aware educational robots has often relied on
a common belief that the relationship between student affect and
learning is independent of agent behaviors (child’s/robot’s) or unidirectional
(positive/negative but not both) throughout the entire
student-robot interaction.We argue that the student affect-learning
relationship should be interpreted in two contexts: (1) social learning
paradigm and (2) sub-events within child-robot interaction.
In our paper, we examine two different social learning paradigms
where children interact with a robot that acts either as a tutor or
a tutee. Sub-events within child-robot interaction are defined as
task-related events occurring in specific phases of an interaction
(e.g., when the child/robot gets a wrong answer). We examine subevents
at a macro level (entire interaction) and a micro level (within
specific sub-events). In this paper, we provide an in-depth correlation
analysis of children’s facial affect and vocabulary learning.
We found that children’s affective displays became more predictive
of their vocabulary learning when children interacted with a tutee
robot who did not scaffold their learning. Additionally, children’s
affect displayed during micro-level events was more predictive of
their learning than during macro-level events. Last, we found that
the affect-learning relationship is not unidirectional, but rather is
modulated by context, i.e., several affective states facilitated student
learning when displayed in some sub-events but inhibited
learning when displayed in others. These findings indicate that
both social learning paradigm and sub-events within interaction
modulate student affect-learning relationship.
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