Let’s listen and tell a story together: social robot and multidimensional learning engagement among young learners

Abstract Storytelling activities delivered by social robots have not been adequately studied in the existing literature. Prior work has mainly investigated the use of social robots in telling stories to young children. Our study examined the effects of both storytelling and story co-telling facilitated by a social robot on children’s learning engagement and story comprehension, comparing to the same activities facilitated by a human and a tablet. Adopting an experimental design, the levels of emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement and story comprehension of 77 children (aged 5–7) who participated in two storytelling activities (listening to a story and co-telling a story) facilitated by either a robot, a tablet, or a human were measured. Changes in behavioral engagement between the two learning activities were also examined. Our results showed that the levels of behavioral and cognitive engagement in the social robot condition were comparable to the human condition, and better than the tablet condition. Interestingly, behavioral engagement was maintained from listening to a story to co-telling the story in the social robot condition and the human condition but not the tablet condition. However, no significant differences were found in emotional engagement and story comprehension across conditions. The findings suggest that social robots are effective educational tools to engage young children in storytelling activities.