Exploring Children’s Choices in an Educational Game on Neurodiversity: Reveiling Underlying Values through Robot’s Socratic Questioning

Abstract

In the Netherlands, there is a shortage of
primary school teachers, due to this shortage, teachers often do not have a lot
of one-on-one time with the students. A social robot could be the solution to
creating more one-on-“one” time with the students. In addition to relieving
some workload for the teachers, a social robot could assist in gaining insight
into personal values. Gaining insight into personal values can contribute to
the learning experience by increasing motivation. The value awareness of the
children is the learning objective as value awareness is thought to increase
the child’s competence and motivation. One of the options to gain insight into
contextual values is Socratic Questioning. These questions are created to
further the learning experience and are expected to increase value awareness.
This thesis investigates how a social robot can assist children in attaining
learning goals, reflecting on these goals, and exploring the decisions and
values underlying their learning experiences related to neurodiversity. The
effectiveness of the robot in achieving learning objectives, encouraging
reflection on decisions and gaining insight into personal moral values is
shown. To gain insight into personal values, two methods of Socratic
Questioning have been compared; Clarification and Implications &
Consequences. The participating children of this thesis play an educational
game where moral dilemmas are presented. A social robot assists in the game and
asks the Socratic Questions. The explanation to the Clarification has proven to
be the most effective method out of the two to gain insight into moral values.
Moreover, the interaction effect between question type and time shows that the
impact of the question type on insight into values varies with the time a
question is asked. Qualitative observations show the participants’ anticipation
of the robot’s questions and show instances where responses are different from
the self-reported value importance. Overall, this research sheds light on the potential
of Socratic Questioning and its uses for understanding individual values,
calling for further exploration in this area.