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Teachers' readiness for technology integration depends also on their beliefs about the contribution of technology to teaching and learning, which influence their motivation for its adoption. Initial pre-service teacher education is critical in reducing the attitude-behaviour divide supporting technology acceptability, acceptance and use. Acceptance of interaction between human and robot is more complicated than human-computer interaction acceptance. Social robots are radical innovations, harder for potential users to accept in human social spaces than are incremental innovations. In 2019, a survey using a convenience sample of 121 first-year students was conducted to examine pre-service teachers' beliefs about social robot educational technology. It examined the following factors derived from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology adopted for social robots in education: Perceived social dimension, Intention to use, Perceived usability, Anxiety. Based on our findings, it seems there is a critical disjunction between researchers' efforts to equip social robots with human manners and social intelligence and participants' rejection of this technology precisely because it mimics being human. Further, we report that ICT familiarity as assessed using PISA's Information Communication Technology--ICT familiarity factors is related to robot acceptability. These findings need further examination to inform educational robotics design and Human-Robot Interaction research and teacher education and training.

Our research aims to examine the effectiveness of introducing social robots as educational technology within authentic classroom activities without modifying them to be designed for a robot. We chose as test subject the fifth‐grade curricular topic “The role of technology and its impact on society”, meeting the critical stage of moral development students aged of 11–12. The study, with both experimental (EG) and control groups (CG), will be conducted over 6 weeks. This study will examine the impact of robot‐supported lessons with post‐participation testing on learning outcomes and examine students' perception of the robot in the classroom as a potential correlation with academic performance. The form of the study will be a between‐group non‐randomised controlled experiment. Control and experimental groups will be matched concerning gender, mastery of technology and previous knowledge and understanding of the curricular topic in focus. The instructional design of process‐outcome strategies will incorporate all of Bloom's taxonomic levels. In the review of related studies, we identified gaps in social robot‐supported lessons within the regular curriculum between‐group experiment. Based on a review of related research showing more focus on robot performance in the classroom from technical‐interaction aspects we want to convey from pedagogical starting point. The robot's placement in the pedagogical process will be considered an integral part of the teacher's technical environment. We will use the pre‐participation test to establish whether there is the initial equivalence between EG and CG in terms of gender, mastery of technology, and previous knowledge and understanding of the curricular topic under examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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