We all remember dozing off (瞌睡) during a boring class at school. A robotic teacher that monitors students’ attention levels and follows the techniques human teachers use to hold their pupils’ attention promises to end the doze, especially for students who have their lessons online. Tests indicate the robot can improve how much students remember from their lessons.
Intelligent tutoring systems that use virtual (虚拟的) teachers to interact with students could play a key role in the expanding field of online education. The trouble with online courses is that it is usually impossible to know whether the student is concentrating and engaging with the lesson. Unlike virtual teachers, human teachers have a series of tricks for keeping their classes focused — changing the tone of their voice, for example, or gesturing to emphasize points and engage with their audience. Bilge Mutlu and Dan Szafir at the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to find out whether a robot could use some of the same techniques to improve how much a student focuses.
“We want to look at how learning happens in the real world.” says Mutlu. “What do human teachers do and how can we draw on that to build an educational robot that achieves something similar?”
The pair programmed a robot to tell students a story in a one-on-one situation and then tested them afterwards to see how much they had remembered. Engagement levels were monitored using a $200 EEG sensor to monitor the FP1 area of the brain, which manages learning and concentration. When a significant decrease in certain brain signals indicated that the student’s attention level had fallen, the system sent a signal to the robot to produce a cue (提示). “We can’t do it just at any given moment, we have to try and do it like human teachers do.” says Mutlu.
The robot teacher first told a short story about the animals that make up the Chinese animal zodiac (生肖), in order to get a baseline EEG reading. Next, the robot told a longer 10-minute story based on a little-known Japanese folk tale called My Lord Bag of Rice, which the student was unlikely to have heard before.
During this story the robot raised its voice or used arm gestures to regain the student’s attention if the EEG levels dipped. These included pointing at itself or towards the listener — or using its arms to indicate a high mountain, for example. Two other groups were tested but the robot either gave no cues, or tested them randomly throughout the storytelling. Afterwards, the students were asked a few questions about the Chinese zodiac to distract (分散注意) them before being asked a series of questions about the folk tale.
As the team had expected, the students who were given a cue by the robot when their attention was disappearing were much better at recalling the story than the other two groups, answering an average of 9 out of 14 questions correctly, as compared with just 6.3 when the robot gave no cues at all.
The idea of regaining students’ attention in this way would have “significant meanings for the field of education”, says Andrew Ng, director of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab.
“One-on-one tutoring has been repeatedly shown to give notable results in student learning, but the main problem with it is the cost, and that it’s just difficult to measure,” Ng says. “The imagining of automatically measuring student engagement so as to build a more interactive（互动的）teacher is very exciting.”
50. What does the author tell us in Paragraph 2 about online education?
A. It has trouble in monitoring the students.
B. It plays an important part in students’ learning.
C. It is more popular with students than traditional education.
D. It enables students to follow teachers’ instructions better.
51. The underlined word “dipped” in Paragraph 6 is closest in meaning to “__________”.
A. fell B. grew C. remained D. continued
52. Which of the following is the result of Bilge Mutlu and Dan Szafir’s test?
A. The robot teacher’s voice made the students remember more.
B. The students who were given cues from the robot were much better at remembering.
C. The students could stay focused due to the attractive gestures of the robot teacher.
D. The robot teacher was better at telling stories to students in an individual situation.
53. Which of the following would Andrew Ng probably agree with?
A. A robot teacher can distract the students’ attention.
B. One-on-one tutoring costs less than a robot teacher.
C. A more interactive robot teacher will be very promising.
D. Attention plays the most important role in students’ education.
54. What would be the best title for the text?
A. How to Hold Pupils’ Attention
B. Fun Programs for Robot Teachers
C. How to Avoid Dozing Off during Classes
D. Robot Teachers Keep Students Focused