Well, being as I was curious for a bigger sample size, and being as three other foreign-teachers at this institute also had classes complete this essay, I glanced at the others, via the online system. (We can see anyone’s essay, anytime). Purely personal curiosity, no pretense of direct educational value. (But tangential value, perhaps).
I calculated the totals for all the institute’s students, and present the data below, based on school-grade, gender, and skill-level of the students. (These students are generally-upper-middle-class Korean 7th-9th graders, living in a Seoul satellite city).
______________________________________________________________
Results:
92 essays were written in total
8 supported robot teachers [8.7%]
As I suspected, though, there is a wide variation in opinion depending on the type of student:
______________________________________________________________
Demographic Characteristics of the “Robot Supporters”:
By Gender
— 6 / 44 Boys supported robot teachers [12% of the boys who wrote this essay]
— 2 / 48 Girls supported robot teachers [4% of the girls who wrote this essay]
[See much more here]
— 6 / 55 Ninth Graders [11%] [3rd-grade-middle-school in Korea, born in 1998]
— 2 / 20 Eighth Graders [10%] [2nd-grade-middle-school in Korea, born in 1999]
— 0 / 17 Seventh Graders [0%] [1st-grade-middle-school in Korea, born in 2000]
By Gender and School Grade
— 5 ninth-grade boys said ‘Yes’ to robot-teachers / 28 ninth-grade boys completed the essay [18%]
— Of the 64 other students (ninth-grade girls and all non-ninth-graders) who completed the assignment, only three said ‘Yes’ to robot-teachers [5%]
By Skill Level
(Four different skill-groupings completed the assignment. Together, these form the top–20%-or-so, by English ability level, of the institute’s middle-schoolers)
— 1 / 24 [4%] — Highest-Level Cohort [PO] — The students with the highest ability level in the institute
— 2 / 18 [11%] — 2nd-Highest-Level Cohort [E3]
— 2 / 26 [8%] — 3rd-Highest-Level Cohort [T3/E2]
— 3 / 24 [13%] — 4th-Highest-Level Cohort [T2]
— x / 402 — Other 7th-9th-grade students enrolled at the institute, who are in lower-skill cohorts / Did not write this essay.
Note: The two girls who supported robot-teachers are in PO and E3, the highest and second-highest classes. All the rest in the above are boys.
______________________________________________________________
Conclusion:
Opposition to robot-teachers is overwhelming (around 20-to-1) among all subgroups of the institute’s students, except lower-skill-level older boys, among whom opposition to robots-as-teachers is only three-to-one or so.
Question:
I can understand why girls would prefer human teachers (most students seemed to say something like: “as robots cannot understand human emotion, they would be ineffective teachers”), but why were higher-skill-level students so opposed? Of the 24 PO students, all eight boys were anti-robot, and 15 of the 16 girls were anti-robot.