Social and Emotional Learning Through Child-Robot Interaction

• In Event: 28.026 - Designing Robots for Children: Multisensory Interactions and Multimodal Assessments

Abstract

This presentation will address the cognitive and social theoretical perspectives that may guide research on child/robot interaction (CRI). A focus in the past 15 years among educators, policy-makers, and researchers on “social emotional learning” provides another lens for understanding affordances and limitation of humanoid robots in contexts of schooling and learning. The purpose of this presentation is to bring social practice theory (Holland and Lave 2009; Bourdieu 1990) to bear on questions about possible roles for humanoid robots in learner identity development processes.

Social emotional learning (SEL) is a category of competencies that have been identified by education reformers and researchers as valued outcomes of school that are beyond mastery of narrowly defined disciplinary skills and academic content learning. Focusing on this ‘beyond’ – also referred to as “non-cognitive skills,” ”metacognition,” and “soft skills” – supports research on collective and individual identity processes, particularly insofar as SEL frameworks call for attention to constructs such as ‘student agency’ and ‘collaboration skills’ and ‘self-management’.

Three ongoing challenges in conducting research on social emotional learning in school contexts are (1) a tendency in research designs (and intervention designs) to isolate the instruction or assessment of SEL skills from academic content instruction; (2) the difficulty of measuring SEL competencies, and measuring growth in these competencies; and (3) the significant role of teacher and researcher biases in interactions with students from different backgrounds, including linguistically diverse students. Humanoid robots offer promise to researchers wanting to side-step these challenges, while simultaneously facilitating the very competencies and positive learner identity processes associated with valued SEL outcomes.

Humanoid robots offer opportunities to experiment with ways of supporting students’ sense of belonging (Goode and Inzlicht 2006) and sense of agency in school learning contexts. Giving students ”voice and choice” during learning tasks, including opportunities to make decisions, revise their thinking and their work, and interpret and critique others’ ideas are known approaches toward more equitable school experiences and outcomes.

Because identity development is related to interaction – and both individual action and collective action – and both are deeply social, one’s identity, or ‘sense of self’, develops over time in many different contexts of social and cultural experience. Humanoid robots offer novel ways of cultivating a “modicum of agency” (Holland et. al. 1996) by which a person can define themselves, rather than being thoroughly and continually defined and determined by the social and cultural forces in their immediate surroundings and historically-marked social position. This presentation will provide an analysis of video of student-robot interaction that illustrates how social practice theory can be applied to better understand students’ identity development as learners, including students’ use and development of language, when mediated by social robots.

Author

• Vinci Daro, Envision Learning Partners