Page 209 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

192 Socially Intelligent Agents

empathy to be essential to their teaching. They described how it created trust,
nurtured feelings of security, built confidence and enabled two-way communi-
cation. The teacher had to learn about the child as much as the child had to
learn about the subject. Empathy was central to high quality, effective teach-
ing and learning, enabling greater understanding, better assessment, better aca-
demic and emotional support and consequently more appropriate teaching pro-
vision and more appropriate differentiation. Empathy equalises relationships,
valuing children’s contributions and understanding and allowing them more
control over their learning. Empathy enables the right support, to be given at
the right time, ensuring better scaffolding.

4. Methodology
Empathy built into the methodology of project design involves valuing ex-
isting knowledge and understanding and recognising best practice. Sensitive
system design reflects this by involving all participants from the outset [7].
Rapid prototyping in real situations with continual feedback from pupils and
teachers, coupled with theoretical reflection on the outcomes from a more de-
tached perspective, is more likely to ensure appropriate and responsive learning
systems. The complexity of evaluating the use of technology in education is
well documented and there are both established and evolving schemes to sup-
port and illuminate the process [9, 15]. We chose to adapt a methodology,
first developed by Carroll and Rosson [4]. This methodology is one of sev-
eral participatory design approaches, and is organised around the identification
and exploration of key scenarios. Additionally, it uses a form of design ratio-
nale known as claims analysis. We extended the claims concept to incorporate
the pedagogical intentions underlying the design, and called this pedagogi-
cal claims analysis. With this method of evaluation each aspect of the design
process is linked to some possible pedagogic outcome, which raises possible
issues and suggests how each particular claim might be checked. During the
initial collection of pedagogical claims, children and teachers were engaged
in low-technology design, [18]. The evaluation has both formative and sum-
mative aspects. The initial claims are revised and validated throughout the
formative prototyping phase. The claims help the understanding of the design
process and making design decisions explicit. Generating many claims in a
complex project helps determine priorities. The way the classroom functioned
was observed before the technology was introduced and teachers met to discuss
and share their ways of working and teaching methodology for literacy. They
developed typical scenarios of existing ways of working and then envisaged
ways in which the new technology might support/enhance the functioning of
their existing classrooms. Hence teachers helped to design both the classroom
layout and contributed their ideas and understanding to the software develop-