The Robot Bookworm: Fostering Children’s Reading Motivation through Personalized Book Discussions
Elena Malnatsky, Sobhaan ul Husan, Kuhu Sinha, Sofie Veld, Rafaella van Nee, Daniël Wijnhorst, Shenghui Wang, Koen V. Hindriks, Mike E.U. Ligthart · 2026
We present the Robot Bookworm, a multi-session intervention co-designed with children and educators to foster reading motivation through personalized book discussions. The robot assigned each child a personally fitting book and engaged them in pedagogically structured discussions, with personalized book-aligned dialogic content selectively generated offline by a language model and moderated by people to ensure safety. We compared a personalized book discussion condition with a book-neutral control in a four-session, large-scale user study in two primary schools (N = 101, 8-11 y.o.). The intervention significantly increased reader-book relatedness and reading enjoyment, particularly for children with below-ceiling baseline enjoyment, but had no effect on intrinsic motivation. At a one-year follow-up, the quantitative effects were not sustained. However, children reported perceived positive shifts in attitudes towards reading, which they attributed to the Robot Bookworm.