Do Robotic Tutors Compromise the Social-Emotional Development

Do Robotic Tutors Compromise the

Social-Emotional Development of

Children?

Matthijs H. J. Smakman

*, Elly A. Konijn

and Paul A. Vogt

Department of Communication Science, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands,

Institute for Information and

Communication Technology, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht , Utrecht, Netherlands,

School of Communication,

Media and IT, Research Group Digital Transformation, Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

Social robots are reported to hold great potential for education. However, both scholars

and key stakeholders worry about children’s social-emotional development being

compromised. In aiming to provid e new insights into the impact that social robots can

have on the social-emotional development of children, the current study interv iewed

teachers who use social robots in their day-to-day educational practice. The results of our

interviews with these experienced teachers indicate that the social robots currently used in

education pose little threat to the social-emotional development of children. Children with

special needs seem to be more sensitive to social-affec tive bonding with a robot compared

to regular children. This bond seems to have positive effects in enabling them to more

easily connect with their human peers and teachers. However, when robots are being

introduced more regularly, daily, without the involvement of a human teacher, new issues

could arise. For now, given the current state of technology and the way social robots are

being applied, other (ethical) issues seem to be more urgent, such as priva cy, security and

the workload of teachers. Future studies should focus on these issues ﬁrst, to ensure a safe

and effective educational environment for both children and teachers.

Keywords: social robots, child-robot interaction, education, social development, primary school, social skills,

bonding, friendship

INTRODUCTION

Social robots are gradually being introduced in primary education. They provide new opportunities

for improving cognitive outcomes, such as learning a second language (Vogt et al., 2019; Konijn et al.,

2021), rehearsing the times tables (Konijn and Hoorn, 2020), learning sign language (Luccio and

Gaspari, 2020) and training handwriting (Aktar Mispa and Sojib, 2020). In addition, social robots are

used to support motivational and affective elements of learning (e.g., the learner being attentive,

receptive, responsive, reﬂective, or inquisitive) (Belpaeme et al., 2018). Although social robots show

potential as learning or teaching companions for children, according to a recent literature review

(Johal, 2020), other studies on the use of social robots in education have reported that it is too early to

conclude that robots are, for instance, effective as language tutors (van den Berghe et al., 2019), or

more effective than human teachers or other types of technology (Woo et al., 2021). Furthermore,

both scholars (Sharkey, 2016; Woo et al., 2021) and stakeholders (Smakman et al., 2021a) have voiced

concerns related to social robots potentially harming children’s social-emotional development.

Social robots differ from other types of robots used in education, such as STEM robots. Other than

STEM robots, social robots are designed to take on social roles such as that of a tutor or peer that

Edited by:

Mohamed Chetouani,

Université Pierre et Marie Curie,

France

Reviewed by:

Konstantinos Tsiakas,

Delft University of Technology,

Netherlands

Hatice Kose,

Istanbul Technical University, Turkey

*Correspondence:

Matthijs H. J. Smakman

[email protected]

Specialty section:

This article was submitted to

Human-Robot Interaction,

a section of the journal

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

Received: 01 July 2021

Accepted: 07 January 2022

Published: 21 January 2022

Citation:

Smakman MHJ, Konijn EA and

Vogt PA (2022) Do Robotic Tutors

Compromise the Social-Emotional

Development of Children?

Front. Robot. AI 9:734955.

doi: 10.3389/frobt.2022.734955

Frontiers in Robotics and AI | www.frontiersin.org January 2022 | Volume 9 | Article 7349551

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

published: 21 January 2022

doi: 10.3389/frobt.2022.734955

assists children during their learning process. Having physical

embodiment, the option to act (semi-) autonomously, and the

capability to interact with humans by following social norms, can

be considered as the three deﬁning capacities for social robots

(Hegel et al., 2009). Using these capacities, a robot can act as a

social entity, such as in the role of a tutor, a peer, or that of a naïve

learner (Hood et al., 2015). The feeling that users are socially

connected with robots is central to the ﬁeld of social robotics

(Belpaeme et al., 2013).

Children’s social-emotional development is not only

important during childhood, but also for adulthood and public

health, because it is associated with academic performance,

substance abuse, mental health, workplace and academic

performance (Cherniss, 2000; Denham, 2006 ; Tremblay, 2020).

Children’s social-emotional development can be characterized by

ﬁve domains: 1) social competence, 2) attachment, 3) emotional

competence, 4) self-perceived competence, and 5) temperament/

personality (Denham et al., 2009). Milestones in social-emotional

development domains differ per developmental period of

children. For the purpose of this study, we will focus on the

milestones associated with the primary school period. The ﬁrst

domain, social competence, can be deﬁned as a child’s ability and

effectiveness in social interaction (Rose-Krasnor, 1997).

Children’s general developmental tasks related to social

competence that should be assessed in primary school are the

formation of dyadic friendships, solidiﬁcation of peer status, and

general diminution of physical aggression. Related to attachment,

children in primary school should begin to balance the

connection to parents and peers. The milestones for children

in primary school related to emotional competence are the ability

to understand complex emotions, such as unique perspective and

ambivalence, and to be able to apply cognitive strategies to

regulate emotions. Children’s self-perception of competence

can be deﬁned as “one’s evaluations of one’s own abilities,

including the child’s own assessment of his/her cognitive,

physical and social abilities, especially in comparison with those

of others” (Denham et al., 2009, p. 44). During primary school,

children’s views of their own competence become more complex,

earlier notions of self-perceived competence are solidiﬁed and

social evaluations by peers and teachers become more important

(Denham et al., 2009). Lastly, for the domain temperament/

personality, children’s personality attributes become

increasingly differentiated during primary school. In earlier

research, social robots have been reported to potentially

inﬂuence several aspects of the social-emotional development

domains, such as social competence (Peter et al., 2021) and

attachment (Coeckelbergh et al., 2016).

Key stakeholders, such as teachers, parents, and policymakers,

have also voiced concerns related to the potential social-affective

bond that children may develop with a robot (Serholt et al., 2017;

Smakman et al., 2020a, Smakman et al., 2020b

). They report

worries in the ﬁeld that such a bond could harm children’s social-

emotional development (Smakman et al., 2021b). Children

bonding with robots could lead to children preferring the

interaction with robots over that of their human friends and

teachers, potentially resulting in the loss of human contact

(Sharkey, 2016; Pandey and Gelin, 2017), social isolation

(Kennedy et al., 2016), and dehumanization (Serholt et al.,

2017). Children could also start to expect too much from

robots, which could lead to children ending up feeling

deceived or feeling anxious when the robot is absent (Sharkey,

2016). These potential risks related to the social-affective bond

that children may develop with a robot might harm the children’s

social-emotional development. According to a recent study

(Pashevich, 2021), it is still unclear what kind of effect social

robots might have on the social-emotional development of

children.

Children have been reported to perceive social robots as

entities with whom they will likely form social relationships

(van Straten et al., 2020). What kind of relationships children

form with robots is still unclear. For example, children are

reported to perceive social robots as potential private tutors

(Shin and Kim, 2007), possible rivals (Shin and Kim, 2007),

and even friends (Lin et al., 2009). Various scholars argue that this

newly perceived bond with technology might inﬂuence children’s

behavior, both positively and negatively. Researchers have found

that robots seem able to elicit socially desirable behavior among

children, such as sharing, but they may also elicit socially

undesirable behavior, such as aggressive behavior (Peter et al.,

2021). Children have also been recorded to express bullying

behavior towards an educational robot ( Kanda et al., 2012)

and others have expressed concerns related to the robot

becoming a bully or becoming subject to bullying (Diep et al.,

2015). What type of children are more susceptible to the inﬂuence

of the robot on social-emotional domains, however, is still

unclear. According to a recent study (Tolksdorf et al., 2021),

the in ﬂuence of individual variables, such as shyness, are still

understudied in the ﬁeld of child-robot interaction (CRI).

Measuring social-emotional development is complex. For each

domain of children’s social-emotional development, there exist

multiple measurement instruments such as the Rothbart Child

Behavior Questionnaire for emotional competence (Putnam and

Rothbart, 2006), and the Social Skills Rating System for social

competence (Van der Oord et al., 2005). Furthermore, these

scales differ per developmental period and pose challenges in

their use in longitudinal studies (Denham et al., 2009). Child-

robot interaction studies in education are often short-term

studies and rarely deploy robots for more than a few days,

according to reviews on social robots in classrooms (Rosanda

and Starčič, 2019; Woo et al., 2021). Systematic, long-term

evaluation of the potential negative impact of social robots’

potential on children’s social-emotional development is

lacking. This might be explained by social robots still being a

nascent technology. An accepted approach to evaluate the

potential long term (negative) impact of nascent technology is

to include stakeholders into the design and evaluation of

technology (Friedman et al., 2008).

Teachers are one of the most important stakeholders when

implementing social robots in education. They are not only

responsible for the learning process in a classroom, but they

also play a key role in children’s social-emotional development

(Denham et al., 2009). They could therefore provide insights into

the potential compromising role of social robots. However, in the

extant literature on teachers’ perspectives on social robots,

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

teachers have had little experience with robots (Van Ewijk et al.,

2020; Xia and LeTendre, 2020; Chootongchai et al., 2021).

Additionally, researchers have pointed out that the level of

experience with robots could inﬂuence stakeholders’

perspectives (Serholt et al., 2014). People with experience to

working with robots are signiﬁcantly more likely to have a

positive attitude towards social robots, compared to people

with little to no experience (Smakman et al., 2021a). This

makes it hard to evaluate the potential harms and beneﬁts

voiced by teachers in earlier studies.

The lack of experience of stakeholders combined with the

limited empirical data, make it hard to evaluate the reported

potential risks related to children’s social-emotional

development. Given that studies are often short-term and

stakeholders’ worries are hard to evaluate, there is a need to

examine the impact that social robots have on children’s social-

emotional development now that social robots are entering day-

to-day education for longer periods of time. Therefore, this study

aims to assess the impact of social robots in primary education on

the social-emotional development of children. To this aim, we

conducted in-depth interviews with teachers who have applied

social robots in their day-to-day education. These primary school

teachers all have a thorough knowledge of the social-emotional

development of the children in their classroom, as this is part of

their daily job. Therefore, in our opinion, they are most

appropriate persons to assess the impact of social robots on

children. Besides the impact on children’s social-emotional

development, we examined which children, according to the

teachers, would be more susceptive to social robots, and what

the teachers would consider best practices for using social robots

responsibly. In the next section, we will ﬁrst describe our

methodology, followed by our results. Thereafter, we will

discuss our main ﬁndings in light of earlier research and

discuss our conclusions.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Participants

For qualitative research, such as this interview study, participants

can best be selected based on their understanding of the

phenomenon (Kuper et al., 2008; Creswell and Creswell,

2009). Therefore, via purposeful sampling, participants were

selected. The criterion for participants to be included in our

study was: being a primary school teacher in the Netherlands with

ﬁrst-hand experience in using social robots in a real-life

educational setting. Participants were recruited through

newsletters of robotic companies, messages on social media,

snowballing (Ghaljaie et al., 2017) and direct e-mails. Nine

experienced teachers agreed to participate in our research

(Mean age = 36 SD = 10, 8 Female, 1 Male). On average, they

had 12 years of working experience, ranging from 1.5 to 35 years.

The participants ranked their own experience with robots on a

1–5-point rating scale (1 = having very little experience and 5 =

having very much experience). The mean score for the experience

with robots was 3.66 (SD = 0.82). In total, the participants

supervised/facilitated the child-robot interaction of 2,660

primary school children from all primary school levels/grades.

General information about the teachers who participated in the

interviews is shown in Table 1.

Materials and Measures

In setting up our interview guidelines (Taylor, 2005), we followed

the ﬁve phases of the framework for the development of a

qualitative semi-structured interview guide created by Kallio

et al. (2016). First, we established that a semi-structured

interview would be a rigorous data collection method in

relation to our research question, because it allows the

interviewer to improvise follow-up questions based on the

teachers’ answers and it allows room for participants’ verbal

expressions. Second, we created an initial set of questions

targeting teachers’ perspectives on the robot’sinﬂuence on

children’s social-emotional development based on existing

literature. These questions included four main themes. The

ﬁrst questions were related to the social demographic data of

the participant, such as age and gender, because these are shown

to inﬂuence people’s perception of robots (European

Commission, Directorate-General for Communication, 2017).

The second type of questions was about how the teachers

applied the robots in their classroom. These included which

robot they used, but also what role the robot was given in the

classroom. Earlier research has shown that children react

differently to, for example, a robot as a peer, compared to that

of a robot as a teacher (Zaga et al., 2015). Furthermore, role

switching has also been shown to have potential as a motivational

strategy (Ros et al., 2016). The third and fourth themes were

related to the possible perceived social-affective bond of children

with the robot and its potential inﬂuence on children’s social-

emotional development. After setting up the initial interview

protocol, two expert scholars in social robotics reviewed the

interview guide to validate the coverage and relevance of the

content. Furthermore, as prescribed by Kallio et al. (2016), the

feedback of the experts was used to reformulate the questions and

to test the implementation. This resulted in the ﬁnal list of

interview questions, which can be found online (https://osf.io/

qne96/).

Procedure and Analysis

Over a span of 2 months, from February to April 2021, the data

for this study were collected. Due to the COVID19 pandemic, all

interviews were conducted online via Microsoft Teams. The

interviews started with a short introduction about the purpose

of the study, after which the questions started. As mentioned, the

interviews were semi-structured (Kallio et al., 2016 ), which

allowed us to deviate somewhat from the formal set of

interview questions when needed, and to explore the thoughts

and beliefs of participants in more detail. In general, each

interview lasted between 45 min and 1 h. At the end of the

interview, we inquired whether participants would like to

voice any other potentially relevant information related to

child development and robots in education. Lastly, we asked

participants if they could provide us with names of other teachers

who had applied social robots in their education and might be

willing to participate in this study. All interviews were recorded,

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

for which all participants provided active verbal consent.

Afterwards, the recordings were transcribed. All transcriptions

were then analyzed using an inductive and deductive coding

process through a qualitative data analysis application (ATLAS.ti,

version 9). To identify patterns within and across the data, we

used a thematic analysis method (Braun and Clarke, 2012). First,

we coded the text based on the main themes of the interview

questions (participant data, use of robots, social-affective bond,

and social-emotional development). Thereafter, we randomly

read samples of the data and created thematic codes, shown in

Table 1. We then applied the codes onto new sample texts derived

from our interview transcriptions. Using this iterative process, we

created our ﬁnal coding scheme which we applied to all data

collected. The themes were coded by a scholar with considerable

experience in conducting qualitative studies in social robotics and

education. The ﬁnal coding scheme can be found online (https://

osf.io/qne96/). Lastly, the effects of the robots on children derived

from the thematic analysis were linked to the appropriate

domains of children’s social-emotional development reported

in the literature (Denham et al., 2009). This was done during

a mapping workshop by the ﬁrst author and two undergraduate

students.

RESULTS

All participants had experience with applying humanoid robots

in their education, being either with the Nao robot (SoftBank

Robotics, 2020) or the Alpha mini-robot (Ubtech, 2021). One

participant also had experience with other types of robots, such as

the Innobot, Probot, Bluebot, Microbot, and Ozobot. Experience

with applying robots ranged from 6 years to a couple of months.

The participants had applied the robots in their day-to-day

education for teaching children arithmetic, language,

geography, presentation skills, physical education, and

computational thinking. Eight participants had used the robots

as a social entity (as a tutor or peer), sometimes combined with

using the robot purely as a tool, such as for learning

programming. One participant had used the robot just as a

tool for teaching programming. The number of interactions

with the robot per child ranged from just one to sixteen times

per period of 10 weeks. The time children had spent working with

the robot ranged from 15 min to 1 hour per interaction. None of

the participants systematically measured the effect of the robot

during their lectures. The teachers used robots in all classes of the

primary school, which included children from age 4 up to

12 years.

Place in Education

Eight out of nine teachers mentioned that social robots (should)

have a place in primary education. They considered the robot a

good educational tool, mainly because it can enrich the lessons.

“Some children learn more easily from books, another child learns

more easily from a screen with interactivity, and a robot gives an

extra dimension to education [...] it is one of the means by which

you prepare children for a future” as one teacher indicated. The

teachers overall stated that they viewed the robots as additional

support for the teacher, or to provide help for solving problems

(such as knowledge gaps) by means of targeted help. Teachers had

applied the robot in small groups and in one-to-one interaction

settings. Most teachers indicated that the robot has a clear novelty

effect and that children are fascinated and amazed by the robot.

Most of the teachers stated that the children are enthusiastic

about the robot and are (more) motivated to work and learn with

the robot.

One teacher did not consider social robots to have a place in

primary education, for two reasons: 1) because of the high cost

and 2) because of a lack of impact in primary education. Although

the teacher stated that the robot does create a deeper kind of

learning, because of the social interaction, she considered the

robot best for special education. In special education, the teaching

methods would be more open-minded for using robots and not so

restricted and formalized as in regular primary education,

according to this teacher. Three other teachers also indicated

that the high cost of the NAO robot was an issue. Especially for

teaching programming skills, they considered nonsocial or non-

humanlike robots cheaper and therefore more appropriate.

Overall, the teachers indicated that the current social robots

require a lot of work from the teacher. As one teacher explained:

“It is really labour-intensive for the person who sets up and

prepares the robot, and this is still an impeding factor.”

Teachers also indicated that it will take some time before

other teachers are acquainted with robots because the

educational methods change rapidly every few years, which

TABLE 1 | Data on participants in the interviews.

Interview # Gender Age Experience as

a teacher

(years)

Experience with

robots (1–5 scale)

# Children

interacting with

a robot

1 F 39 14 4 600

2 F 25 3 3 57

3 F 36 13 2 20

4 F 42 10 5 700

5 F 57 35 4 540

6 F 28 7 3 200

7 M 39 12 4 500

8 F 25 1,5 4 25

9 F 35 14 4 18

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

also takes time to implement. Furthermore, the lack of evidence

that robots are (more) effective makes it hard to convince school

management to invest in the implementation of social robots,

according to one teacher.

Impact on Social-Emotional Development?

It should ﬁrst be noted that none of the teachers systematically

measured the robot’s effect on the children’ s social-emotional

development. Due to the relatively broad age range of the children

that interacted with the robot (4–12 years), which covers both the

primary school period and the preschool/early childhood period,

and because the general developmental tasks that should be

assessed in each dimension of social-emotional development

differs for each developmental period, we decided to describe

the perceived impact based on the themes derived from our

thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2012).

All teachers indicated that social robots can have a positive

impact on the social-emotional development of children. They

reported several examples of how children’s social-emotional

development could be affected by social robots, such as by

boosting children’ s self-conﬁdence and by increasing children’s

ability to express themselves. All reported impact was considered

positive. Only a few occasions were reported where some (mainly

young) children were afraid of the robot. Based on the thematic

analysis, we were able to distinguish ﬁve positive effects which

were reported by the teachers, being: 1) Self-conﬁdence, 2)

helping other children, 3) ability to express oneself, 4) ability

to be patient and listen to others, and 5) curiosity stimulation.

Thereafter, we linked the themes to the appropriate domains of

children’s social-emotional development, shown in Figure 1.In

the next sections, we will present the results based on the derived

themes and discuss their potential effect on the theoretical

domains of children’s social-emotional development.

Self-Conﬁdence

Almost half of the teachers reported higher self-conﬁdence as a

positive result of child-robot interaction. Children who were shy

to talk in public or in groups could give presentations together

with the robot, which could bolster the self-conﬁdence of the

children. One teacher explained: “Giving presentations causes a lot

of stress in children. I think it is good if you give them a choice, that

they can give the presentation, in the ﬁrst instance, completely by

the robot, and then for example together, so that children, perhaps

unconsciously, are presenting in front of groups. This way they will

get used to it, in a very safe manner [...] you actually take away a

lot of stress”. Also, teachers indicated that children who are a bit

shy or socially less capable, could become the robot expert of the

class, which would boost their self-conﬁdence: “I could put

children who are socially not very strong in the spotlight so that

they would become a robot expert. They were then able to teach

other children or help the teacher, so they grew in their whole being

because of this ... , this changed their [social] position and place in

the group”, as one teacher explained. Furthermore, teachers

reported that children more easily practice subjects they ﬁnd

FIGURE 1 | Overview of themes based on the interviews and the linked theoretical constructs of social-emotional development, based on the literature.

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

difﬁcult with the robot because a robot does not judge or laugh at

them when they give a wrong answer. This is also reported to

create more social interaction between children, as one teacher

who used the robots for extra support in language learning

described: “We have a school where several children come from

a different culture. They have difﬁculty speaking Dutch, and they

don’t speak Dutch at home. They ﬁnd it difﬁcult to speak in public,

and a robot helps them with this and thus helps with their own

language development, which also makes it easier for them to make

contact with peers. That is what we have seen, it absolutely had an

impact”. None of the teachers reported negative outcomes related

to the self-conﬁdence of children. Although, some teachers

reported practical issues related to the speech of the robot that

sometimes lacks the proper pronunciation, especially with

longer words.

The capability of the robot to contribute to children’sself-

conﬁdence can be (in)directly linked to three of the ﬁve social-

emotional domains. F irst, the increased social interaction

between children, caused by the increased self-conﬁdence of

shy children, could lead to the formation of dyadic f riendships,

which is linked to the social-emotional domain of social

competence. Furthermore, this could lead to a more

balanced connection with their peers, which is related to

the social-emotional domain of attachment. Lastly, the

robot could contribute to the domain of self-perceived

competence, because it could resu lt in a child’sincreased

ability to assess one’s own social abilities in comparison

with those of others.

Helping Other Children

Several teachers indicated that they applied the robot to

enhance social interaction between children. For example,

by giving some children the role of robot expert, they created a

new role in the group. According to teachers, this did not only

increase children self-conﬁdence (cf. Self-Conﬁdence), but it

also allowed the robot experts (often the socially weaker

children) to more easily interact with other classmates.

Also, by letting children work with the robot in small

groups, the interaction between children in the groups was

stimulated. Furthermore, when the robot was used by multiple

groups in sequence, the last group could help the next group

when they encountered difﬁculties. One teacher expressed

concerns about when the robot would be used for one-on-one

tutoring, which could potentially lower the contact w ith other

children. The teacher considered this as part of the broader

trend of (smart)phone use and time spent on a computer,

which seems to lower personal, face-to-face contact. However,

the teacher could not tell whether t he robot caused children to

interact less with each other. Likewise, this was not reported

by any of the other interviewed teachers.

The option to apply a social robot to stimulate helping

behavior can be (in)directly linked to two of the ﬁve social-

emotional domains. The introduction of social robots, which

allows for the creation of new roles in the classroom as indicated

by the teachers to stimulate interaction, and can be linked to the

domains of social competence and attachment.

Ability to Express Oneself

Some teachers reported on children who, before the introduction

of the robot, would not be willing to talk to the teacher, or did not

want to learn. However, after the robot was introduced in the

classroom, these children started to talk. First to the robot, and

thereafter to the teacher. Teachers said that they expected that

children would more easily express certain things to robots than

to their teachers. “I think that a robot could deﬁnitely be used for

that [emotional support] as well [...] because it is something that is

a bit further away from you and a bit less personal, so I think it is

easier to discuss more difﬁcult things [...] and certainly in the

social, emotional area,” as voiced by one of the teachers. Some

teachers used the robot as a means to let children talk about their

feelings by letting the robot express emotions. This has led to the

opportunity to talk about emotional feelings. One teacher

compared this to hand puppets that are currently used in the

Dutch educational system to start conﬁrmations on difﬁcult

subjects, which the teacher considered a similar tool.

Children opening up to a robot about their feelings relates to

two of the ﬁve social-emotional domains. First, it could allow

children to cope with negative emotions, learn about emotions

and emotional expressiveness, which is linked to emotional

competence. Second, it allows for the possibility for children to

get more insight into their own social competence, which is

related to the domain of self-perceived competence.

Ability to be Patient and Listen to Others

Two of the teachers reported on the robot’s ability to teach

children to be patient and listen more carefully to others. This

was mainly caused by the robot’s script that did not allow a child

to go any faster, according to the teachers. “You have to keep calm

and you also have to keep your impulses in check [...] you also

have to be careful, children are normally rumbling everywhere, in a

manner of speaking, but that is really not possible. So yes, there is

really something being asked of them”, as one teacher reported.

The teachers indicated that the robot made children listen more

to others and wait their turn. However, they also indicated that

the robot would need to be in the classroom for longer periods to

make a lasting impact on these skills.

The ability to be patient and more carefully listen to others

could, in theory, contribute to understanding the unique

perspective of others, which can be linked to emotional

competence.

Curiosity Stimulation

Several teachers indicated that they have seen how robots can

stimulate children’s curiosity. Most teachers reported on the

robot being something “magical” or “special”. This made

children curious to learn about and from the robot, also for

subjects they would otherwise dislike or even avoid. One teacher

experienced the following: “I had one child at that time, who did

not want to learn. That does not happen often, but he really did not

want to, he had no interest at all in reading or in letters or in math

or something else, but that robot that was really it. Once that robot

was there, he did everything. That was so special, he did everything

he had to do, but not with me, but with the robot. With me, he just

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

closed down, but with the robot, he did it all.” The teacher

indicated that she did not encounter this behavior often.

Other teachers mentioned that they had also experienced how

robots stimulated and motivated children, although they voiced

that they did not consider the currently limited interactions

enough to have a long-lasting effect on children’s curiosity.

The ability of the robot to stimulate curiosity can contribute to

the social-emotional domain of temperament/personality. By

stimulating children’s curiosity, they could become more

encouraged to follow and experience aspects that suit their

personality, which can be linked to the temperament/

personality domain.

In summary, the teachers expressed ﬁve ways by which social

robots can impact the theoretical domains of children’s social-

emotional development, which is illustrated in Figure 1. Children

potentially getting attached to the robot was a topic that came up

regularly during the interviews. Therefore, we decided to discuss

attachment as a topic separately in the next section.

Attachment

Almost half of the teachers indicated that children can feel

emotionally attached to a robot. Some indicated that this

attachment would not be different from how children attach

to other objects children like, such as video games and toys. One

teacher saw a child with bonding problems getting emotionally

attached to the robot, but did not encounter this with other

(typically developing) children. Some teachers indicated that

while young children could feel attached to the robot, older

children, around the age of 11-12, would consider the robots

merely as a tool.

Another teacher reported on a child talking about the robot as

his best friend, while other participants indicated that they have

seen children interact with the robot as if it were their buddy. In

several interviews, teachers indicated that children showed a kind

of empathy and affection towards the robot. As one teacher

experienced: “They [children] also immediately asked when he [the

robot] would come back, and everyone wanted to take care of it,

you really noticed that the care aspect really came up there. Such

that it had actually become a kind of a buddy.” Another teacher

indicated to be concerned that children would view the robot as a

best friend, however, this teacher did not encounter this in her

own classroom. Furthermore, several teachers indicated that for

children to become attached to a robot, the robot would have to

be present much more often than is possible in the current

educational system.

What Would be Considered “Too Attached”?

When asked for signals that would indicate that children are too

attached to the robot, teachers expressed two main indicators: 1)

when it results in less contact with their human peers, and 2)

when children would get upset when the robot was not around.

However, four teachers indicated explicitly that they have not

encountered this in their classes, and that the way robots are being

applied nowadays poses little risk for children to become too

attached. “In the current education you don’t get it [attachment

issues] very quickly, only if you always have a robot in class” and “I

see few risks in the way in which we now use robots” as explained

by two other teachers. The other ﬁve teachers did mention

encountering attachment issues in their classes.

Although the teachers did not encounter children becoming

too attached to the social robots, this might be due to the short

interaction time and the limited number of interactions children

had with the robot. Therefore, we continued to further ask the

teachers on what type of children would be more susceptible to

getting attached to social robots.

Children who are More Susceptible to Getting

Attached to Social Robots

The current literature does not provide a solid basis for

deriving insights into what kind of children would be more

susceptive to getting attached to social robots. To gain more

insight into which children might be at risk to become ‘too

attached’ to a social robot, we conducted a thematic analysis to

differentiate between types of children based on the interview

transcripts (Braun and Clar ke, 2012). The teachers expressed

four types of children who would be m ore susceptible to

getting attached to social robots.

• The ﬁrst type, indicated by seven of the nine teachers, is

timid, socially less strong, and could have an autism

spectrum disorder (ASD). However, regarding ASD, it

should be noted that one teacher explicitly stated that

these usually are children of which the teachers think

they have ASD because it is mostly not yet diagnosed at

this young age. Indeed, a number of studies reported

successful interactions of social robots speciﬁcally

focusing on children with ASD (e.g., Huijnen et al., 2016;

Di Nuovo et al., 2020).

• The second type of children concerns children who are

interested in science and engineering. “The children who are

just very interested in robots and programming”, as one

teacher explained. This is in line with common applications

of robots for STEM education (e.g., Ahmad et al., 2020).

• The third type of children that can be considered more

sensitive for the robot’s interaction, as indicated by two

teachers, are children who are underachievers on a certain

subject, such as language learning or math. Studies indeed

reported good results for language learning (Vogt et al.,

2019; Konijn et al., 2021) or rehearsing the times tables

(Konijn and Hoorn, 2020).

• The fourth and ﬁnal type of children who are more sensitive

to social robots are children with special needs, such as

children with attention deﬁcit hyperactivity disorder

(ADHD), highly sensitive children, highly gifted children,

and children sensitive to game addiction. Seven teachers

indicated that these children can be considered more

sensitive for child-robot interaction in education: “The

children who have a certain need [...] children with

ADHD, or just children who are highly gifted, they could

be attracted in a certain way if it suits them, and then there

are many possibilities to work with this,” as explained by one

teacher. In earlier studies the potential for children with

ADHD have been discussed before (e.g., Fridin and

Yaakobi, 2011)

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

The teachers expressed several best practices to ensure that

these types of children would not get too attached to the robot.

The best practices expressed also included general remarks on

how social robots could be implemented in a responsible way,

according to these experienced teachers. In the next section, we

present these ﬁndings.

Best Practices and Success Factors for

Child-Robot Interaction in Education

The interviewed teachers reported about what they considered

best practices and success factors when applying social robots in

primary education. In total, they reported eight best practices and

success factors for applying social robots in primary education.

To provide an overview of these best practices and their

description we present them in Table 2.

DISCUSSION

The main goal of this interview study was to examine whether

social robots in primary education compromise the social-

emotional development of children. Therefore, we interviewed

primary school teachers who supervised the child-robot

interaction of more than 2,600 unique children in a real-life

school environment. Nearly all child-robot interactions reported

by our interviewees were one-on-one or small group interactions

in which a humanoid robot took the role of a tutor or peer. Each

robot was used for teaching children a speciﬁc subject or skill in a

school environment.

The main ﬁnding of our study is that the participating teachers

experienced no negative effects on the social-emotional

development of children caused by the child-robot interactions

that would have a lasting negative impact. In contrast, teachers

expressed seeing ﬁve positive effects of social robots related to the

social-emotional development of their pupils, being 1) increased

self-conﬁdence, 2) helping other children, 3) increased ability to

express oneself, 4) increased ability to be patient and listen to

others, and 5) curiosity stimulation. These ﬁve themes could be

linked to all domains of children’s social development reported in

developmental literature, as discussed in the introduction and

summarized in Figure 1.

The social robots seemed especially useful for introducing the

learning by teaching paradigm (Fiorella and Mayer, 2013). This

allows for some children to take on new roles, such as that of an

expert. This can have a positive effect on children’s social-

emotional development. For example, by giving children an

expert role, or by letting experienced groups help other

groups. Novel technologies, such as social robots, seem

appropriate to support children in such roles. The robot’s

impact on the children’s ability to be patient and to listen

carefully was reported to be caused mainly by the current state

of technology that does not allow children to respond quickly,

and due to the intonation of the robot which is sometimes

lacking. Given that automatic speech recognition based on

child-robot interaction has been shown to be a complex issue

(Kennedy et al., 2017), it is unlikely that robots will be able to

respond quickly to children’s verbal reactions in the near future.

Therefore, we consider that the robot’s positive impact on

children’s ability to be patient and to listen will remain for the

foreseeable future. However, teachers indicated that they

wondered whether the effect on children’s ability to be patient

and to listen would impact the children in the long run. The other

three effects, increased self-conﬁdence, ability to express oneself,

and curiosity stimulation, seem all speciﬁcally useful for children

with special needs.

Four types of children were identiﬁed by the interviewed

teachers, three of whom could speciﬁcally beneﬁt from social

robots and be receptive to interacting with a social robot. These

children are considered to have special needs, either the timid,

TABLE 2 | Best practices and success factors for applying social robots in primary education.

# Title Description

1 Apply when needed Make sure there is a clear why for applying social robots, robots are means not ends. Social robots are considered to be an

addition to the teacher, not a replacement. When applying the robot every day, the novelty effect can wear off. Use social

robots for a speciﬁc aim or goal

2 Teacher stays involved The role of the teachers stays very important, he/she should be present during the child-robot interaction, or at least close

by. Also, the teacher can judge which children potentially get too attached to the robot, and which children would beneﬁt

most from the interaction. This might lead to an increase in the number of teaching assistants needed to facilitate the robot

interaction

3 Proper introduction Teachers should pay speciﬁc attention to the introduction of the robot. Children should ﬁrst be told what a robot is, and what

is it going to do, before they start to interact with a robot

4 Small groups Learning with robots is best done in small groups. This not only allows children to continue communicating with their peers,

but it can also stimulate children to interact with each other and not get socially isolated

5 Vertical groups Let children of different age groups work together with the robot, make use of the older, more expe rienced children to

introduce and guide younger children

6 Separate room When a small group of children is working with the robot, this is distracting for the other children in the classroom. Therefore,

the robot should not be in the same room as where other children are who do not work with the robot

7 Team effort and mindset For robots to be sustainably implemented in schools, the technology needs to have the support of the teacher-team

including the school management. A teacher in the role of a robot ambassador can be appointed to introduce the robot to

other teachers, making it easier to implement the robot

8 Parents The parents of the children should be informed pro-actively by the schools when social robots are going to be used. This is

the responsibi lity of the school

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

socially less strong children potentially with ASD,

underachievers, or children with other special needs, such as

ADHD or attachment issues. According to the teachers, these

children could potentially beneﬁt the most from social robots in

education when it comes to their social-emotional development

and are indeed often addressed in studies (e.g., Fridin and

Yaakobi, 2011; Huijnen et al., 2016; Konijn and Hoorn, 2020).

As a downside, the interviewed teachers reported that these

children might get more attached to the robot in the long run,

which could, in theory, lead to less human contact and children

getting upset when the robot would not be around. However, this

has not been observed by our teachers, and they further indicated

that the robot would need to be present much more for this

to occur.

To ensure that some children will not get too attached to the

robot, teachers have indicated that they should supervise the

child-robot interaction, or at least be close by. The teachers in

our study mentioned that applying social robots in education is

labor-intensive, and requires time and effort to use and

implement. This is in line with another study reporting

about teachers being worried that s ocial robots would

increase the workload of teachers (Reich-Stiebert and

Eyssel, 20 16). A recent review on robots in classrooms came

to similar results, concluding that “the current generation of

commercially available robots, like NAO or Pepper, do not

have sufﬁcient p rogramming to be readily integrated into

classrooms without extensive support and resource

mobilization” (Woo et al., 2021,p.9).

The comparison of the bond between children and robots to

the bond between children and other humans might not be the

best way forward. Although some children seem to behave as if

they are friends with a robot (Fior et a l., 2010), robots are still a

different entity. When comparing human-robot interaction to

interaction between humans, Black (2019) argues against

developing empathy with robots because children cannot

experience the kind of affect toward robots that they

develop with other humans, such as their human peers and

teachers. However, if we use the robot to simulate human

interaction, by letting children work together, this doesn’t

seem to be a big problem. Furthermore, for social robots to

be able to support children in primary education, there seems

to be no need for very humanlike robots with extensive

empathy capabilities; current studie s on the u se of social

robots in education do, most of the time, not use very

humanlike robots with extensive empathy capabilities, and

still show promising results (e.g., Konijn and Hoorn, 2020).

One might argue that robots need extensive empathy

capabilities for teaching social skill s to children who cannot

learn thes e with their human peers because of d isorders, such

as ASD. Although humanoid robots with extensive empathy

capabilities might help this speciﬁc group of children, there

seems little r eason to equip robots w ith far-reaching h uman

embodiment when it comes to assisting regular children in

their school process.

The social bond between child and robot challenges the

fundamentals of friendship and relationships, according to

Richards and Calvert (2017). However, according to the

teachers in our study, such social bonds are infrequent and

similar to the bond children have with other technologies or

artefacts, such as smartphones and (hand) puppets. Thus, the

negative impact of social robots on the fundamentals of

friendship and relationships, for now, seems limited.

Other researchers have found that robots seem able to elicit

socially desirable behavior among children, such as sharing (Peter

et al., 2021). However, according to the same researchers, this

may also apply to socially undesirable behavior, such as aggressive

behavior (Peter et al., 2021). Children have been recorded to

express bullying behavior towards an educational robot (Kanda

et al., 2012). Others have also expressed concerns related to the

robot becoming a bully or becoming subject to bullying (Diep

et al., 2015). However, following the best practices of the

participants in our study, when teachers stay involved in the

child-robot interaction, this scenario seems unlikely. Teachers or

teaching assistants could intervene when such undesirable

behavior occurs. Nevertheless, the results of other researchers

emphasize the importance to be careful in how robots are

presented to children because robots (in videos) have been

shown to negatively inﬂuence children’s pro-social behavior

and willingness to share resources in an experimental setting

(Nijssen et al., 2021).

The participating teachers did not report major privacy issues

related to the child-robot interaction, except one related to IT

security, and they did not use extensive personalized data

collection by the robot. This might be due to the relatively

simple, not highly personalized child robot interaction

currently used in schools. In other studies, privacy has been

reported to be a major issue related to social robots in education

(Sharkey, 2016; Smakman et al., 2021a). Data collection allows

personalized interaction, which is one of the key beneﬁts,

according to scholars (Kanda et al., 2012; Shimada et al., 2012

;

Jones et al., 2017; Jones and Castellano, 2018; Woo et al., 2021).

Although the teachers in our study did not report on major

privacy issues, given the need for data collection for personalized

learning, we consider the issue crucial for integrating social robots

in education in a responsible way and should therefore be subject

for further research.

One limitation of this study is that, although the participants

had experience with using a social robot in their day-to-day

education and supervised the child-robot interaction of over

2,600 unique children, the total number of participants was

limited. However, given that all participants had experience

with using a social robot in their day-to-day education,

combined with the large number of unique children they

supervised, they still provide valuable insights into the

currently observed effects of social robots on children. The

gender distribution was unequally balanced, with only one

male participating teacher. However, this can be considered a

reﬂection of the gender distribution in Dutch primary education,

where approximately 80% is female (Traag, 2018). It should also

be noted that this study was carried out solely in the Netherlands,

therefore the results may differ in other countries. Furthermore,

none of the teachers systematically measured the robot’s effect on

the social-emotional development of children. The evaluations in

this study are solely based on the teachers’ previous experiences

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Smakman et al. Compromised Social-Emotional Development

and observations. The experiences of these teachers could differ

from how children experienced the robot interaction. Further

studies could compare the perceptions of children to the

perceptions of their teachers. Future studies in child-robot

interaction could also include the Social Skills Rating System

(SSRS) or the social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales

(SSIS-RS) (Gresham et al., 2011), to systematically measure the

impact of social robots in children’s development.

In conclusion, our study indicates that the social robots

currently used in education pose little threat to the social-

emotional development of children according to teachers who

applied these robots in their day-to-day education. Children

with special needs seem to be more sensitive to social bonding

with a robot compared to regular children. However, this

social-affective bond seems to have more positive effects

enabling them to more easily connect with their human

peers and teachers.

Given that the best practices reported in this study a re taken

into account, we consider that social robots pose more beneﬁts

than harms concerning the s ocial-emotional development of

children. However, when robots are being introduced more

regularly, daily, without the involvement of a human teacher,

new issues could arise. For now, given the current state of

technology and the way social robots are being applied, other

(ethical) issues seem to be more urgent, such as privacy and

security issues, and the workload of teachers.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online

repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and

accession number(s) can be found in the article/

Supplementary Material.

ETHICS STATEMENT

The patients/participants provided their written informed

consent to participate in this study.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Conceptualization, MS and PV. EK; data curation, MS; formal

analysis, MS; funding acquisition, MS. EK; investigation, MS;

methodology, MS, EK, and PV; project administration, MS

resources, MS and EK; software, MS; supervision, EK and PV;

validation, EK and PV; visualization, MS; writing original draft,

MS; writing review and editing, EK, PV, and MS.

FUNDING

Research supported by The Dutch Research Council (NWO),

project number 023.010.066.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank all participants in our study. We also would like to

thank the robotic companies that included our request to

participate in our study in their newsletter.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2022.734955/

full#supplementary-material

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