In peer mediation--an approach to conflict resolution used in many K-12 schools in the United States--students help other students to resolve conflicts. For schools without peer mediation programs, socially assistive robots (SARs) may be able to provide an accessible option to practice peer mediation. We investigate how elementary school students react to a peer mediator role-play activity through an exploratory study with SARs. We conducted a small single-session between-subjects study with 12 participants. The study had two conditions, one with two robots acting as disputants, and the other without the robots and just the tablet. We found that a majority of students had positive feedback on the activity, with many students saying the peer mediation practice helped them feel better about themselves. Some said that the activity taught them how to help friends during conflict, indicating that the use of SARs for peer mediation practice is promising. We observed that participants had varying reading levels that impacted their ability to read and dictate the turns in the role-play script, an important consideration for future study design. Additionally, we found that some participants were more expressive while reading the script and throughout the activity. Although we did not find statistical differences in pre-/post-session self-perception and quiz performance between the robot and tablet conditions, we found strong correlations (p<0.05) between certain trait-related measures and learning-related measures in the robot condition, which can inform future study design for SARs for this and related contexts.

翻译：同伴调解是美国许多K-12学校采用的冲突解决方法，即学生帮助其他学生解决冲突。对于尚未建立同伴调解项目的学校，社交辅助机器人（SARs）可能提供一种可行的替代方案来实践同伴调解。我们通过一项探索性研究，调查了小学生对同伴调解角色扮演活动的反应。我们开展了包含12名参与者的单次跨组对照研究，设置两种实验条件：一种采用两个机器人作为争议方，另一种仅使用平板设备而无机器人。研究发现，大多数学生对活动给予积极反馈，许多学生表示同伴调解实践提升了自我认同感。部分学生指出该活动教会了他们如何在冲突中帮助朋友，这表明使用社交辅助机器人进行同伴调解实践具有良好前景。我们观察到参与者的阅读水平存在差异，这影响了他们阅读和转述角色扮演脚本的能力，这是未来研究设计需要考虑的重要因素。此外，部分参与者在阅读脚本和活动过程中表现出更强的表达力。虽然未发现机器人组与平板组在前后测自我认知和测验表现上存在统计学差异，但在机器人组中某些特质相关指标与学习相关指标呈现显著相关性（p<0.05），这可为社交辅助机器人在本领域及相关情境的未来研究设计提供参考。