Attitudes towards Social Robots in Education: Enthusiast, Practical, Troubled, Sceptic, and Mindfully Positive
Smakman,Matthijs H. J. Konijn,Elly A. Vogt,Paul Pankowska,Paulina
Smakman,Matthijs H. J.
Konijn,Elly A.
Vogt,Paul
Pankowska,Paulina
Abstract
While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moral challenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation of these robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholder perspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectives however mainly focus on single stakeholders. In this exploratory study, we examine and compare the attitudes of multiple stakeholders on the use of social robots in primary education, using a novel questionnaire that covers various aspects of moral issues mentioned in earlier studies. Furthermore, we also group the stakeholders based on similarities in attitudes and examine which socio-demographic characteristics influence these attitude types. Based on the results, we identify five distinct attitude profiles and show that the probability of belonging to a specific profile is affected by such characteristics as stakeholder type, age, education and income. Our results also indicate that social robots have the potential to be implemented in education in a morally responsible way that takes into account the attitudes of various stakeholders, although there are multiple moral issues that need to be addressed first. Finally, we present seven (practical) implications for a responsible application of social robots in education following from our results. These implications provide valuable insights into how social robots should be implemented.
Description
Funding Information: Funding: Research supported by The Dutch Research Council (NWO), project number 023.010.066. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Date
2021-03
Journal Title
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Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
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Keywords
Child-robot interaction, Education, Educational robotics, Ethics, Moral concerns, Robot tutors, Social robots, Stakeholder perspectives
Citation
Smakman, M H J, Konijn, E A, Vogt, P & Pankowska, P 2021, 'Attitudes towards Social Robots in Education : Enthusiast, Practical, Troubled, Sceptic, and Mindfully Positive', Robotics, vol. 10, no. 1, 24, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010024
License
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess