Social educational robotics and learning analytics: a scoping review of an Emerging field

Abstract

Social Educational Robotics and Learning Analytics (LA) are prominent fields in technology-enhanced learning, but their combined potential remains underexplored, despite methodological similarities. Increasingly, signs of joint interests have emerged, with a surge in publications mentioning both social robots and learning analytics in the last five years. We therefore conducted a scoping review to explore if a new research field is emerging. We identified 29 empirical studies that combine social robots and LA, but also found that few studies explicitly state that social educational robots and LA are used in combination. Several studies used social educational robots that adapted to the learners or the learning environment based on interaction data. This signifies that they are in fact employing the feedback cycle that is at the core of LA methodology, but as most of these studies update the learner model using post-session data (e.g., learner improvement or feedback), they are long-term studies with repeated interventions that are applying LA methodology inadvertently. There are also benefits for LA research to use social educational robots, since LA increasingly uses an array of equipment to collect multimodal data, and all studies in this review employ at least two input modalities (μ = 4.4). Social robots provide the possibility to collect this data non-intrusively with the robot itself, in addition to creating a pedagogically boosted interaction compared to traditional LA interventions (e.g., learning management systems). By raising researchers’ awareness of how close the fields of social educational robotics and LA are, substantial synergy effects could therefore be gained.

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ORCID for Adriana Wilde: orcid.org/0000-0002-1684-1539

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