A Novel Robot-Assisted Learning Pedagogy for Children with ASD

RESUMO

Interaction paradigms used in robot-assisted autism intervention have historically employed robots as teachers, clinical assistants, or more-abled peers to promote a variety of social skills. These modalities often leverage the expertise of trained practitioners to ensure that child-robot interactions are productive or clinically grounded to yield positive therapeutic benefits for children across the autism spectrum. Yet, despite the fact that the majority of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) attend mainstream schools and spend 80% or more of their time in the general classroom [27], there is a paucity of research incorporating validated classroom teaching pedagogies into robot-assisted autism interventions. In this work, we introduce a novel teaching methodology for advancing social skills in school-aged children with ASD. We evaluate the effectiveness of a novel robot-assisted autism intervention which incorporates the learning-by-teaching pedagogy and explores the comparative benefits of employing a robot versus a human confederate for improved performance on a set of social skills tasks. Results show that 80% of study participants performed better in the robot condition (mean performance in the robot condition=63%, mean performance in the confederate condition=37%), irrespective of the scenario order. Further, 90% of all participants were significantly more engaged in the robot condition (mean engagement: robot=61%, confederate=32%) and, while the effect did not result in the confederate condition, analyses indicate that overall engagement in the robot condition contributed to improved performance. These results suggest that robots employed in a learning-by-teaching context may help enhance engagement and improve performance on a simple social skills task for children with ASD.