Exploring parents' perceptions towards educational robots: Gender and socio-economic differences

A study was conducted to investigate how parents perceived educational robots. Thirty-nine parents, whose children study in a junior high school in northern Taiwan, responded to the self-report questionnaire. Seventeen were male and 22 were female. Eight were 30 years of age, 26 were 40-49 years of age, and five were above 50 years of age. The perception questionnaire was adopted from the parent perception scale developed by Feng and co-researchers. There are 15 Likert-type questions, ranging from 1 to 5, and three dimensions were included in this questionnaire. The repeat measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to investigate parents' attitude towards educational robots. The result indicated that significant differences were found among the three dimensions. The post hoc testing showed that the scores of the two dimensions, usefulness of educational robots and supportive behaviors, did not showed significant difference. The score of the dimensions, confidence in teaching children with educational robots, was significantly lower than that of the other dimensions, usefulness of educational robots.