ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Learning Innovations
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1581175
This article is part of the Research TopicEnhancing Educational Outcomes through RoboticsView all articles
Not just another quiet student: Reducing participation imbalance through robot moderation
Provisionally accepted
- University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
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Introduction: Despite their many advantages, group activities can result in participation imbalance, especially when a participant joins the activity remotely. In this experimental study, we address the issue of imbalance in small groups, which consist of two co-situated participants and one remote student on a telepresence robot. The aim is to investigate whether using a robot to moderate group activities can affect engagement and balance participation.Methods: 84 participants were recruited and assigned to two conditions, namely baseline (without a robot moderator) and experimental (with a robot moderator). As participants engaged in completing a language learning task, the moderator implemented verbal and nonverbal interventions.Results: Data analysis shows that while nonverbal interventions mostly failed, verbal interventions had a success rate of 88.24% in encouraging participants to start speaking. Regarding the talking time of group members, results show significant differences between the mean scores in both conditions, indicating a more balanced participation of group members in the experimental condition. Participants also formed positive attitudes toward the robot moderator.Discussion: In conclusion, using the robot moderator positively affected group dynamics by encouraging quiet participants to be more active and rendering the interaction to be more balanced.
Keywords: Group work, balancing participation, students' talking time, Telepresence robot, robot moderation
Received: 21 Feb 2025; Accepted: 18 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Asadi and Fischer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ali Asadi, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 5230, Denmark
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