Papers by Samuel Spaulding
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction - HRI '14, 2014
In education research, there is a widely-cited result called "Bloom's two sigma" that characteriz... more In education research, there is a widely-cited result called "Bloom's two sigma" that characterizes the differences in learning outcomes between students who receive one-on-one tutoring and those who receive traditional classroom instruction [1]. Tutored students scored in the 95 th percentile, or two sigmas above the mean, on average, compared to students who received traditional classroom instruction. In human-robot interaction research, however, there is relatively little work exploring the potential benefits of personalizing a robot's actions to an individual's strengths and weaknesses. In this study, participants solved grid-based logic puzzles with the help of a personalized or non-personalized robot tutor. Participants' puzzle solving times were compared between two non-personalized control conditions and two personalized conditions (n=80). Although the robot's personalizations were less sophisticated than what a human tutor can do, we still witnessed a "one-sigma" improvement (68 th percentile) in post-tests between treatment and control groups. We present these results as evidence that even relatively simple personalizations can yield significant benefits in educational or assistive human-robot interactions.
We present the results of a 100 participant study on the role of a robot's physical presence in a... more We present the results of a 100 participant study on the role of a robot's physical presence in a robot tutoring task. Participants were asked to solve a set of puzzles while being provided occasional gameplay advice by a robot tutor. Each participant was assigned one of five conditions: (1) no advice, (2) robot providing randomized advice, (3) voice of the robot providing personalized advice, (4) video representation of the robot providing personalized advice, or (5) physically-present robot providing personalized advice. We assess the tutor's effectiveness by the time it takes participants to complete the puzzles. Participants in the robot providing personalized advice group solved most puzzles faster on average and improved their same-puzzle solving time significantly more than participants in any other group. Our study is the first to assess the effect of the physical presence of a robot in an automated tutoring interaction. We conclude that physical embodiment can produce measurable learning gains.
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Papers by Samuel Spaulding