Robots facilitate self-talk: effects on ownership, self-efficacy, and learning performance

Robots can facilitate learning and enable students to play active roles as designers to create, solve, and present their learning outcomes. An effective learning strategy to accomplish a learning task is through self-talk, where individuals engage in multifaceted internal dialogues to enhance understanding and regulate thinking. However, conducting self-talk can be challenging as it primarily occurs within students’ minds, making it invisible to others and even themselves. Therefore, this study introducing robots as vehicles for students to make their self-talk learning visible and presentable. These robots are designed to record and playback students’ voices, acting as collaborative scaffolding tools that assist students in visualizing and validating their self-talks. To evaluate the proposed approach, a quasi-experiment was performed involving 100 university students pursuing a Japanese Hospitality course in Taiwan. The findings showed that the proposed approach enhanced the students’ learning achievement. Moreover, using the robot as a student's designed self-talk had positive effects on both learning ownership and self-efficacy. Our study provides human-centered guidance for creating educational tools by harnessing commercial robots and conversational technology to support self-talk learning, shifting robots from traditional roles to innovative conversational partners. This versatile, do-it-yourself approach opens doors for readers to implement interactive learning environments.