Abstract
Social robots are reported to hold great potential for education. However, both scholars and key stakeholders worry about children’s social-emotional development being compromised. In aiming to provide new insights into the impact that social robots can have on the social-emotional development of children, the current study interviewed teachers who use social robots in their day-to-day educational practice. The results of our interviews with these experienced teachers indicate that the social robots currently used in education pose little threat to the social-emotional development of children. Children with special needs seem to be more sensitive to social-affective bonding with a robot compared to regular children. This bond seems to have positive effects in enabling them to more easily connect with their human peers and teachers. However, when robots are being introduced more regularly, daily, without the involvement of a human teacher, new issues could arise. For now, given the current state of technology and the way social robots are being applied, other (ethical) issues seem to be more urgent, such as privacy, security and the workload of teachers. Future studies should focus on these issues first, to ensure a safe and effective educational environment for both children and teachers.
Highlights
Social robots are gradually being introduced in primary education
The participants had applied the robots in their day-to-day education for teaching children arithmetic, language, geography, presentation skills, physical education, and computational thinking
The main goal of this interview study was to examine whether social robots in primary education compromise the socialemotional development of children
Summary
Social robots are gradually being introduced in primary education. They provide new opportunities for improving cognitive outcomes, such as learning a second language (Vogt et al, 2019; Konijn et al, 2021), rehearsing the times tables (Konijn and Hoorn, 2020), learning sign language (Luccio and Gaspari, 2020) and training handwriting (Aktar Mispa and Sojib, 2020). Social robots show potential as learning or teaching companions for children, according to a recent literature review (Johal, 2020), other studies on the use of social robots in education have reported that it is too early to conclude that robots are, for instance, effective as language tutors (van den Berghe et al, 2019), or more effective than human teachers or other types of technology (Woo et al, 2021). Other than STEM robots, social robots are designed to take on social roles such as that of a tutor or peer that
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