Development and validation of an educational robot attitude scale (ERAS) for secondary school students

ABSTRACT

Humanoid robots equipped with social skills have come to be used increasingly in the field of education across various subfields such as science education, special education, and foreign language education. In order to enhance the use of humanoid robots in educational settings, and to comprehensively evaluate its impact on the transformation of the class, understanding students’ attitudes towards the use of robots for educational purposes plays a critical role. This paper outlines the implementation and validation procedures of an educational robot attitude scale (ERAS) developed to measure the attitudes of secondary school students towards the use of humanoid robots in educational settings. The sample of the study comprised of 232 secondary school students. The development and validation process consisted of exploratory factor analysis and convergent validity. The developed scale consists of 17 items and represents four factors of students’ attitude: engagement, enjoyment, anxiety and intention. These four factors accounted for 66% of the total variance of the scale. Internal consistency coefficient for the whole scale was found .90 according to the reliability analysis. The results of the study suggest that the scale is a valid, reliable, and efficient tool for measuring the dimensions of students’ attitudes towards humanoid robots in educational settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary education
• robotics
• humanoid robot
• scale development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Burak Sisman is assistant professor doctor in the Department of Computer Education & Instructional Technology at Istanbul University. His research interests are in the educational robotics, signal processing, technology integration, online learning, teacher education, augmented and virtual reality, 3D virtual environments.

Devrim Gunay is assistant professor doctor in the ELT Department of Hasan Ali Yucel Education Faculty at Istanbul University. He is in coordination of the EnT@SK Project- a scientific research project that aims the collaborative and creative design of English teaching tasks- and voluntarily involved in many others as varied as Robotics integrated Language Teaching. His areas of interest include the sociology of ELF, visual ethnography, multi-literacies, semiotics and TBLT.

Sevda Kucuk is research assistant doctor at the Department of Computer Education & Instructional Technology at Istanbul University. Her research interests are in the augmented reality technology, mobile learning, technology integration, educational robotics, teacher education, distance education, instructional design, and research methods.

ORCID

Burak Sisman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7472-279X

Devrim Gunay http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5765-6957

Sevda Kucuk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2679-5177

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Scientific Research Project Coordination Unit of Istanbul University [Grant Number 52382, 49852, 43480].