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Stereotypes about men being better than women at mathematics appear to influence female students' interest and performance in mathematics. Given the potential motivational benefits of digital learning games, it is possible that games could help to reduce math anxiety, increase self-efficacy, and lead to better learning outcomes for female students. We are exploring this possibility in our work with Decimal Point, a digital learning game that scaffolds practice with decimal operations for 5th and 6th grade students. In several studies with various versions of the game, involving over 800 students across multiple years, we have consistently uncovered a learning advantage for female students with the game. In our most recent investigation of this gender effect, we decided to experiment with a central feature of the game: its use of prompted self-explanation to support student learning. Prior research has suggested that female students might benefit more from self-explanation than male students. In the new study, involving 214 middle school students, we compared three versions of self-explanation in the game - menu-based, scaffolded, and focused - each presenting students with a different type of prompted self-explanation after they solved problems in the game. We found that the focused approach led to more learning across all students than the menu-based approach, a result reported in an earlier paper. In the additional results reported in this paper, we again uncovered the gender effect - female students learned more from the game than male students, regardless of the version of self-explanation - and also found a trend in which female students made fewer self-explanation errors, suggesting they may have been more deliberate and thoughtful in their self-explanations. This self-explanation finding is a possible key to further investigation into how and why we see the gender effect in Decimal Point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex role of touch is an increasingly appreciated horizon for HRI research. The explicit and implicit registers of touch, both human-to-robot and robot-to-human, have opened up pressing questions in design and HRI ethics about embodiment, communication, care, and human affection. In this paper we present results of an MTurk survey about robot-initiated touch in a social context. We examine how a positive or negative attitude from the robot, as well as whether the robot touches an interactant, affects how a robot is judged as a worker and teammate. Our findings confirm previous empirical support for the idea of touch as enhancing social appraisals of a robot, though the extent of that positive tactile role was complicated and tempered by the survey responses' gender effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an observational study conducted at the public environment investigating children's engagement with a social robot within a pretend play scenario. A pretend play system was designed in order to address the challenges of evaluating child-robot interaction by exploiting the advantages of ubiquitous robotics and ambient intelligence of multimodal, multi-sensory perception. The system performed successfully at a children's play centre where a humanoid NAO robot was able to dynamically adapt its gender by changing its gendered voice to match the gender of the child. By analyzing the free play of children, the results obtained confirm the hypothesis of gender segregation within child-robot interaction. These findings are important and ought to be considered when designing robotic applications for children in order to increase robot's perceived likeability, acceptance and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on gender and turnover has produced inconsistent findings. Some investigators have argued that the use of more highly focused job, work and organization facets can reveal patterns not captured by more global measures, and thus resolve some of these contradictory results. Using a sample of almost 1200 individuals, the current study first examined the relationship between quit intentions and global measures of job satisfaction and organizational commitment within each of four groups (male non-managers, male managers, female non-managers and female managers). As hypothesized, the global measures were highly and similarly correlated to an individual's intention to quit in all four groups, suggesting no gender/job level effects. However, when we substituted a set of 11 specific facet measures in place of the two global measures, a unique facet pattern for each group emerged, as hypothesized. Discussion centered on some cautions in interpreting the research and on the need for fully developed theoretical models to guide facet research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study that aims to address the challenges of creating effective educational robots. To this end, we developed a social educational robot which acts as a peer that is also a learner of a foreign language rather than a tutor teaching it. Children engage in a game with a peer robot which is programmed to either always win or always lose. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether children would learn more if they were winning or losing the game to the robot. The conducted study compares children's responses and children's improvements of English vocabulary after a game with the robot. Results indicate that children improve their English after playing with the robot, however which depends on the robot's adapting strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]