Social Robots as Creativity Eliciting Agents

Can robots help children be more creative? In this work, we posit social robots as creativity support tools for children in collaborative interactions. Children learn creative expressions and behaviors through social interactions with others during playful and collaborative tasks, and socially emulate their peers’ and teachers’ creativity. Social robots have a unique ability to engage in social and emotional interactions with children that can be leveraged to foster creative expression. We focus on two types of social interactions: creativity demonstration, where the robot exhibits creative behaviors, and creativity scaffolding, where the robot poses challenges, suggests ideas, provides positive reinforcement, and asks questions to scaffold children’s creativity. We situate our research in three playful and collaborative tasks - the Droodle Creativity game (that affords verbal creativity), the MagicDraw game (that affords figural creativity), and the WeDo construction task (that affords constructional creativity), that children play with Jibo, a social robot. To evaluate the efficacy of the robot’s social behaviors in enhancing creative behavior and expression in children, we ran three randomized controlled trials with 169 children in the 5–10 yr old age group. In the first two tasks, the robot exhibited creativity demonstration behaviors. We found that children who interacted with the robot exhibiting high verbal creativity in the Droodle game and high figural creativity in the MagicDraw game also exhibited significantly higher creativity than a control group of participants who interacted with a robot that did not express creativity (p < 0.05*). In the WeDo construction task, children who interacted with the robot that expressed creative scaffolding behaviors (asking reflective questions, generating ideas and challenges, and providing positive reinforcement) demonstrated higher creativity than participants in the control group by expressing a greater number of ideas, more original ideas, and more varied use of available materials (p < 0.05*). We found that both creativity demonstration and creativity scaffolding can be leveraged as social mechanisms for eliciting creativity in children using a social robot. From our findings, we suggest design guidelines for pedagogical tools and social agent interactions to better support children’s creativity.

English Writing Formative Assessment in Indonesia

This study aimed to investigate the assessment techniques used by a teacher in assessing students’ writing skills, the reason in implementing the techniques, and the students’ responses toward the implementation of the techniques. The collected data in this study included classroom observation that had been held in three times, interview, and written document. The following is the conclusions based on the data analysis. Since formative assessment of writing skill is the main focus of this study, the teacher implemented five writing performance tasks suggested by Brown (2010) namely dicto-comp, picture-cued task, short answer task, guided question and answer, and paragraph construction task. From the teaching process done by the teacher, the assessment tasks were implemented for formative purposes, that is, to monitor students’ progress in comprehending the lesson that is about narrative text. The teacher implemented some assessment tasks in an informal way to monitor students’ ongoing progress without recording the result of the performance, while the other tasks were implemented in a formal way to record students’ progress and to give them an appraisal of their progress and achievement.

The Correlation Between Performances Among Lexical-Related Tasks and The Performance in The Sentence Construction Task

This study employed a quantitative correlational design to explore the correlation between the students' performances among lexical-related tasks and how these tasks affect the performance in a sentence construction task. Using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 22’s Pearson Partial Correlation Test, this study calculated participants' performance in primary lexical attributes by recognizing the following aspects of lexical knowledge: pronunciation patterns, morphological structures, syntactic properties, semantic characteristics such as abstract and interconnectedness, and a complete sentence construction in a strict naturalistic classroom setting. The test results showed that the participants made 297.05 seconds on average for 42 correct responses in Lexical Decision Task, 5.88 seconds per picture projected on the screen in Picture-Naming Task, 8.33 seconds for each word in Semantic Judgment Task, and 30.17 seconds on average to complete a sentence. These results concluded that the participants' performance in identifying strings of letters does not correlate significantly with their performance in understanding how a particular word functions grammatically within a sentence. In terms of the level of automaticity, the participants’ performance exceeded the average performance. The findings suggested that their performance in understanding primary lexical attributes in single lexicons does not facilitate their understanding of semantic characteristics. Henceforth, the students’ lexical knowledge does not yet construct an integrated linguistic representation in the target language acquisition. The study confirmed previous evidence that stated that a better performance in lexical-related tasks significantly impacted sentence processing and construction skill.

Rethinking construction in preschool: discerning didactic strategies in Swedish preschool activities

Even though construction tasks have a long history as an activity in the Swedish preschool, technology as a content matter (e.g., construction) is relatively new. Hence, preschool teachers are generally unsure of the content of technology and how to handle it from a teaching perspective. Thus, there is need for deeper understanding of how construction tasks in preschool can be enacted and what kind of premises are offered to the children. To investigate this, we took our stance in activity theory and the concepts of mediating artifacts, rules and division of labour. This helped us discern what type of instructional practices that were enacted by preschool teachers when working with construction tasks. Activity theory in combination with thematic analysis helped us distinguish four general didactic actions that the teachers used to bring about the construction task—to engage, to guide, to coordinate, to show. These four strategies were then formulated into specific technology didactic actions through the perspectives of technology as product, process and concepts.