Human or Robot University Tutor? Future Teachers’ Attitudes and Learning Outcomes

Abstract

In the coming years, social robots will be widely used in the educational field. Therefore, it is important to identify the future educators’ attitudes towards the use of robots and technological tools. In this paper, we investigate how the exposure of students/pre-service teachers in a robot-tutor can affect their attitudes towards the use of robots in education. We compare a university professor with a robot-tutor in a university class and we demonstrate how each one changes the students’ attitudes towards the use of robots and technology in education as well as the students learning outcome from the course. Furthermore, based on the results of the four experiments we conducted, we also demonstrate the changes in students’ attitudes when they have just a single lesson with a robot-tutor and when they have two courses. Our results demonstrate all students were more positive about the use of robots (and technology) in education after having a course with the robot-tutor than when they had a lecture with a human. Moreover, they had a similar knowledge acquisition level, as indicated by the given knowledge test in both human and robot-tutor conditions. Especially in the case that they had a second lecture with the robot-tutor, they got statistically significantly higher scores in the test in comparison with those who had only one lecture. Our results suggest that a robot-tutor can be an effective tutor, capable of changing students’ attitudes and improving knowledge. Moreover, since the university students in our experiments were pre-service teachers, our paper can act as a reference for teaching, the next generation of teachers, that a robot-tutor can be a useful colleague.