Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children

Abstract Personalized learning has a higher impact on students’ progress than traditional approaches. However, current resources required to implement personalization are scarce. This research aims to conceptualize and develop an autonomous robot tutor with personalization policy for pr...

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Main Authors: Almousa, Ohoud, Alghowinem, Sharifa
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Netherlands 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/145258
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author Almousa, Ohoud
Alghowinem, Sharifa
author2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
author_facet Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Almousa, Ohoud
Alghowinem, Sharifa
author_sort Almousa, Ohoud
collection MIT
description Abstract Personalized learning has a higher impact on students’ progress than traditional approaches. However, current resources required to implement personalization are scarce. This research aims to conceptualize and develop an autonomous robot tutor with personalization policy for preschool children aged between three to five years old. Personalization is performed by automatically adjusting the difficulty level of the lesson delivery and assessment, as well as adjusting the feedback based on the reaction of children. This study explores three child behaviors for the personalization policy: (i) academic knowledge (measured by the correctness of the answer), (ii) executive functioning of attention (measured by the orientation and the gaze direction of child’s body), and (iii) working memory or hesitation (measured by the time lag before the answer). Moreover, this study designed lesson content through interviews with teachers and deployed the personalization interaction policy through the NAO robot with five children in a case user study method. We qualitatively analyze the session observations and parent interviews, as well as quantitatively analyze knowledge gain through pre- and posttests and a parent questionnaire. The findings of the study reveal that the personalized interaction with the robot showed a positive potential in increasing the children’s learning gains and attracting their engagement. As general guidelines based on this pilot study, we identified additional personalization strategies that could be used for autonomous personalization policies based on each child’s behavior, which could have a considerable impact on child learning.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1452582023-01-10T17:11:11Z Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children Almousa, Ohoud Alghowinem, Sharifa Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Abstract Personalized learning has a higher impact on students’ progress than traditional approaches. However, current resources required to implement personalization are scarce. This research aims to conceptualize and develop an autonomous robot tutor with personalization policy for preschool children aged between three to five years old. Personalization is performed by automatically adjusting the difficulty level of the lesson delivery and assessment, as well as adjusting the feedback based on the reaction of children. This study explores three child behaviors for the personalization policy: (i) academic knowledge (measured by the correctness of the answer), (ii) executive functioning of attention (measured by the orientation and the gaze direction of child’s body), and (iii) working memory or hesitation (measured by the time lag before the answer). Moreover, this study designed lesson content through interviews with teachers and deployed the personalization interaction policy through the NAO robot with five children in a case user study method. We qualitatively analyze the session observations and parent interviews, as well as quantitatively analyze knowledge gain through pre- and posttests and a parent questionnaire. The findings of the study reveal that the personalized interaction with the robot showed a positive potential in increasing the children’s learning gains and attracting their engagement. As general guidelines based on this pilot study, we identified additional personalization strategies that could be used for autonomous personalization policies based on each child’s behavior, which could have a considerable impact on child learning. 2022-09-06T13:46:57Z 2022-09-06T13:46:57Z 2022-09-01 2022-09-04T03:13:30Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/145258 Almousa, Ohoud and Alghowinem, Sharifa. 2022. "Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children." PUBLISHER_CC en https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-022-09344-9 Creative Commons Attribution https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The Author(s) application/pdf Springer Netherlands Springer Netherlands
spellingShingle Almousa, Ohoud
Alghowinem, Sharifa
Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children
title Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children
title_full Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children
title_fullStr Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children
title_full_unstemmed Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children
title_short Conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children
title_sort conceptualization and development of an autonomous and personalized early literacy content and robot tutor behavior for preschool children
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/145258
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