International Student Classroom Interaction

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.