Heart vs hard drive: Children learn more from a human tutor than a social robot

Abstract

The field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is increasingly exploring the use of social robots for educating children. Commonly, non-academic audiences will ask how robots compare to humans in terms of learning outcomes. This question is also interesting for social roboticists as humans are often assumed to be an upper benchmark for social behaviour, which influences learning. This paper presents a study in which learning gains of children are compared when taught the same mathematics material by a robot tutor and a non-expert human tutor. Significant learning occurs in both conditions, but the children improve more with the human tutor. This difference is not statistically significant, but the effect sizes fall in line with findings from other literature showing that humans outperform technology for tutoring. We discuss these findings in the context of applying social robots in child education.