Browsing by Author "Serholt, Sofia"

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    Child–Robot Interaction in Education
    (2017-08-25) Serholt, Sofia
    Advances in the field of robotics in recent years have enabled the deployment of robots in a multitude of settings, and it is predicted that this will continue to increase, leading to a profound impact on society in the future. This thesis takes its starting point in educational robots; specifically the kind of robots that are designed to interact socially with children. Such robots are often modeled on humans, and made to express and/or perceive emotions, for the purpose of creating some social or emotional attachment in children. This thesis presents a research effort in which an empathic robotic tutor was developed and studied in a school setting, focusing on children’s interactions with the robot over time and across different educational scenarios. With support from the Responsible Research and Innovation Framework, this thesis furthermore sheds light on ethical dilemmas and the social desirability of implementing robots in future classrooms, seen from the eyes of teachers and students. The thesis concludes that children willingly follow instructions from a robotic tutor, and they may also develop a sense of connection with robots, treating them as social actors. However, children’s interactions with robots often break down in unconstrained classroom settings when expectations go unmet, making the potential gain of robots in education questionable. From an ethical perspective, there are many open questions regarding stakeholders’ concerns on matters of privacy, roles and responsibility, as well as unintended consequences. These issues need to be dealt with when attempting to implement autonomous robots in education on a larger scale.
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    Hedges and Boosters in Academic Writing - A Study of Gender Differences in Essays Written by Swedish Advanced Learners of English.
    (2012-06-30) Serholt, Sofia; University of Gothenburg/Department of Languages and Literatures; Göteborgs universitet/Institutionen för språk och litteraturer
    The primary aim of this study was to investigate the overall frequency in which Swedish advanced learners of English use epistemic modality to express doubt (hedges) and certainty (boosters) in their academic writing; and if there seem to be gender-related differences. The secondary aim was to study how these modifiers were structurally distributed in the essays according to the IMRAD model. A comparative analysis of 20 randomly selected C-essays written by Swedish students of English at several universities was therefore conducted. Slight indications were found suggesting that females were more inclined than males to offer stronger commitments to the propositional information they supplied, but both males and females displayed a substantially higher use of hedges than boosters. Also, both hedges and boosters appeared more frequently in the Introduction and Discussion than the remaining sections of the academic essays.