[CS] Lauren Wright MS Presentation/ Nov.14th

[via cs]

This is an announcement of Lauren Wright's MS Presentation
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Candidate: Lauren Wright

Date: Thursday, November 14

Time: 11am-1pm CST 

Location: JCL 298
 

Title: Robotic Reading Companions Can Mitigate Oral Reading Anxiety in Children

Abstract: Reading fluency is a vital building block for developing literacy, yet the best way to practice fluency - reading aloud - can cause anxiety severe enough to inhibit literacy development in ways that can impact students through adulthood. One promising intervention to mitigate oral reading anxiety is to have children read aloud to a robot. While observations in prior work have suggested that people likely feel more comfortable in the presence of a robot instead of a human, no study has proven that people feel less anxious performing in front of a robot compared to a human, nor identified that lessened anxiety with objective physiological indicators. To investigate whether a robotic reading companion could reduce reading anxiety felt by children, we conducted a within-subjects study where children ages 8-11 read aloud to both a human and a robot while being monitored for physiological responses associated with anxiety. We found that children exhibited significantly fewer physiological indicators for anxiety (vocal jitter and heart rate variability) when reading to the robot compared with reading to a person. This paper provides objective evidence that a robot's presence has an impact on the anxiety a person experiences while doing a task, offering justification for the use of robots in a wide reaching array of social interactions which may require vulnerability from a human.

Advisors: Sarah Sebo

Committee members: Sarah Sebo, Marshini Chetty, and Bilge Mutlu