International Student Classroom Interaction

I have turned in my final paper on this topic as part of the completion of my Master's degree.

I am considering taking some of the findings and breaking them out into another paper but that will have to wait until after my job search and moving are complete.

http://www.jamiemcatee.com/portfolio/papers/capstone.pdf

I hope to have time to post a summary of the findings soon.

I have noticed a lot of traffic from overseas to this blog. If you are an international student coming to study in the United States I would encourage you to spend some time with my thesis. It is long but there is some good information in there. Feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions.

I presented my capstone last Friday. The reaction were very positive especially from the international students in the department. I was really touched by them giving me some roses and all of the kind words they had to say.

I hope to post a video of the presentation soon.

I am working on a write up of the project which I will post when that is finished.

It looks like someone else will be taking on the project after I leave. We are meeting this week to discuss the details. I will have more about that later.

I completed one final test last week with an undergraduate class. There wasn't a great deal of participation or enthusiasm for the concept. I got a few good survey responses and was able to test a few refinements to the system.

Now I am gathering my thoughts for the poster and presentation on the 22nd. I have a lot of data so I need to pick and choose what I present.

After I present I still have to finish the paper the accompanies the presentation. I'd also like to get at least one more paper from just my survey data.

Right now I am in a data analysis phase. I have a bunch of survey data that I need to look at and come to conclusions with. After that I will prepare my poster, presentation and paper. Right now I am targeting a journal with my full capstone and possibly a separate paper on my twitter concept. I need to see what the data looks like.

My presentation date is May 22nd and I have to have my poster and presentation completed by then. The paper is due by May 30th.

I am considering one more test next week with another class for my twitter concept. I have to see if the instructor would be receptive to the idea.

I have finished two of my three tests for my capstone. I haven't had time to look at the survey results since my efforts have been concentrated elsewhere the past few weeks. I am staring a test with a medium sized class this week. I'll be finishing up the setup for that class today.

This test is going to run a little different since the CHI conference will fall right in the middle of the study. The group is also a little different than the small and large classes since it is a mix of PhD and Master's students.

I also have a campus wide international student survey open. I'll have a lot of data analysis to do once I get back from Italy.

I have finished the first week of testing. I am waiting on the participants to take the follow up survey so I can gauge their interest in this idea.

Next week is the group messaging test. I am preparing for that this weekend.

I would like to add a medium sized class to my test group and I have an idea of an ideal target. I just have to see if that professor would be open to the idea.

I ended up having to file a new study for my concept test. I received a few questions from the human subjects committee the other night which hopefully means I will have an approval in hand before spring break, March 10.

My concept test consists of two parts. The first part will ask students in two classes to use Twitter direct messaging to communicate directly with the professors for these classes. The idea in this situation is to allow people who may not want to raise their hand to communicate through another means. The hope is that the professor will acknowledge and encourage their question to build their confidence in asking questions.

The second part of the test will use a group messaging system where the student submits a question to the group in a chat style interface. This allows for others to see the question or comment and respond.

In both cases an anonymous and named account will be available for all participants in the test. They can choose whether they wish to identify themselves or not.

The next few days will be dedicated to setting up a Wordpress instance and the Prologue plugin on this server for the group messaging. I will also be working with the Twitter api for the direct messaging test.

I have completed my interviews. I would love to do more but I am getting to the point where I need to prototype and test. My interviewees gave me a number of things to think about with this project.

I am getting a lot of excitement from professors and a PhD student regarding my in class communication tool. I am working on a human subjects committee application today that I will hopefully file tomorrow so I can start that process.

Right now I have 3 concepts one to help with classroom interaction directly and another to help improve the sense of community in the department.

In class messaging - This would allow students to communicate through an IM type client. Right now I am looking at using twitter or possibly yahoo as the client. The reasoning behind this is that many students fear having to speak in English and prefer writing. Plus they have the opportunity to construct their thoughts. I am looking at having it be both anonymous and named. The two variations on this are a chat room style set up where everyone can see what the others are saying. The other variation is where the student sends a message directly to the instructor.

iFriends - This started out as mentor/mentee but someone pointed out that this seemed to put a hierarchy in place and make it seem more academic. I am still playing with names but iFriends is what it is right now. iFriends is a program where incoming international students are paired with second year American students. I am also looking at pairing incoming American students with second year international students. I picked iFriends since it is cross culture friendships and informatics school friendships. I am open to new names.

Culture sharing - International students would be encouraged to share their culture with other students. This would occur through cultural pages that the students generate to teach people about their culture. These pages would be shared over the summer along with the forum that we already have set up. I am also hoping to encourage more culture sharing in one of the first semester classes.

These are my core concepts. I have also been gathering things that the students mentioned were good practices from the instructors and helped them to feel more comfortable in class. I hope to take this information and put it together in to a presentation of good and back practices when dealing with international students.

I received my HSC approval on Saturday for my interviews with international students. I started interviews today and have been getting really good feedback from my interviewees.

I conducted 3 interviews today and have four more scheduled. I don't know how many I will do but I am trying to talk about my concepts and gain a further understanding of the population I am studying.

I am trying to blend the interviewees between people who are very vocal and outgoing and people who are not as much.

I hope to file a HSC this week to survey the mentor/mentee pairs that were set up by another HCI MS student. I am also going to start on my HSC for the concept study.

I am filing an amendment to my human subjects committee application to conduct interviews of international students to discuss some of the findings from my research. I have a few concepts that I am going to discuss with my interviewees. I would discuss them here but a few of my potential interviewees could be reading this blog.

I met with the office of international student services orientation coordinator to discuss the orientation process. I learned a lot about the the communication process and the information the student received and didn't receive. She also gave me some other resources to talk to.

I am planning on conducting a university wide survey of international students. I am waiting to review my survey and results from my first survey with a professor who teaches a statistics class. From this survey I hope to obtain more information about how other departments student's feel. I am hoping to turn this into a separate paper that I can submit to a few journals.

I had an international student come to my office hours today. He was having trouble taking notes in class and wanted me to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately the AI's don't take notes in class we understand the topics but we don't have the detailed notes. I had encouraged him to find a note taking buddy but it sounded like he would need help with every class.

He did have notes but they were only what the instructor had on the power point slides which is purely an outline. I talked to the instructor and he called the office of international affairs. They suggested a 500 level English class for the student. His spoken English class was wonderful I didn't detect an accent at all.

I am not sure where the breakdown is here between the lecture and the note taking but I think I am going to reach out to him via e-mail to see if I can understand what is going on. I am not going to use him as a subject but this is an area that hadn't jumped out in my research so far. Plus I want to help him out so he can do well in the class.

Here is the paper I submitted to the CHI research competition. It was a really good thought organization exercise so even if I don't get accepted I benefited from writing this paper.

CHI Submitted Paper

I will be using this space to keep track of my progress on my capstone research. My project is looking into International Graduate Student Adjustment to the United States education system concentrating on classroom interaction. This is my final research project as part of my Master's in Human Computer Interaction Design at Indiana University.

You will see some older posts below that I imported from my other blog that pertain to my capstone or thoughts about my capstone. In order to keep all of my capstone thoughts in one place I created this blog.