Attitudes towards social robots in education: Enthusiast, practical, troubled, sceptic, and mindfully positive

Matthijs H.J. Smakman*, Elly A. Konijn, Paul Vogt, Paulina Pankowska

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number24
Pages (from-to)1-21
Number of pages21
JournalRobotics
Volume10
Issue number1
Early online date26 Jan 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2021

Bibliographical note

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.

Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Funding

Funding: Research supported by The Dutch Research Council (NWO), project number 023.010.066.

Keywords

  • Child-robot interaction
  • Education
  • Educational robotics
  • Ethics
  • Moral concerns
  • Robot tutors
  • Social robots
  • Stakeholder perspectives

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