The Effect of Repeating Tasks on Performance Levels in Mediated Child-Robot Interactions

That “practice makes perfect” is a powerful heuristic for improving performance through repetition. This is widely used in educational contexts, and as such it provides a potentially useful feature for application to child-robot educational interactions. While this effect may intuitively appear to be present, we here describe data to provide evidence in support of this supposition. Conducting a descriptive analysis of data from a wider study, we specifically examine the effect on child performance of repeating a previously performed collaborative task with a peer robot (i.e. not an expert agent), if initial performance is low. The results generally indicate a positive effect on performance through repetition, and a number of other correlation effects that highlight the role of individual differences. This outcome provides evidence for the variable utility of repetition between individuals, but also indicates that this is driven by the individual, which can nevertheless result in performance improvements even in the context of peer-peer interactions with relatively sparse feedback.