Robot as a Learning Partner for Promoting Proactive Discussion in Peer Groups: A Case Study for Career Development

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment on peer groups that had a robot as a learning partner, to examine whether the robot could encourage the participants to talk on their own initiative. The authors measured the number of proactive utterances of each participant during the sessions. The authors compared the experimental groups that had robot facilitators, which were manipulated by professional human facilitators, and the control groups, which were also led by professional human facilitators but without a robot. The result showed that the participants in the experimental sessions talked on their own initiative much more than those in the controlled sessions. Finally, the authors qualitatively examined the characteristics of the proactive utterances in the peer group and found that the utterances contained supportive responses, which encouraged the participants to voluntarily join the dialogue promoting the counseling.