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Shweta Sisodiya

Reimagining Technical Support for International Students

Role: Lead Researcher and Primary Researcher | Status: In-Review at TOCHI

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

Despite more than two decades of research, many challenges faced by international students persist. Although scholarship has informed institutional policies and technological interventions, these responses often fail to account for the lived complexities of students’ everyday experiences. Deficit-oriented narratives continue to dominate, positioning international students as lacking and obscuring the invisible labor they undertake to adapt, navigate systems, and cultivate belonging.

In this project, we use Storytelling approach to surface the invisible labor embedded in students’ interactions with technology and to foreground counter-narratives that illuminate the adaptive strategies of international students in the United States. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, I make two key contributions. First, we reveal the often-overlooked invisible labor manifested through students’ micro-conflicts in academic, social, and technological contexts. Second, we offer design implications grounded in students’ own narrative reflections.

By centering lived experience through a non-deficit lens, this project aims to inform more equitable and responsive design practices for international students and other marginalized communities.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

  1. What are the different conflicts experienced by international students in the process of sociocultural adaptation?
  2. How do students assess the usability of existing tools when navigating these conflicts?
  3. How do they envision the future of technological support tools?

CHALLENGES

Conducting research on international students’ use of generative AI presents unique challenges. In this project, we identified key obstacles and adopted strategies to address them effectively:

  1. Diverse Backgrounds and Contexts: International students come from a wide range of cultural, educational, and linguistic backgrounds, which can make designing standardized research instruments and interpreting results consistently difficult. To manage this, we focused on a single demographic—Indian international students. While this introduced some bias, it allowed for deeper, culturally informed insights, leveraging the researcher’s own experience as an Indian international student.
  2. Self-Reporting and Behavioral Gaps: Students may underreport or overreport their use of GenAI due to social desirability, fear of academic consequences, or unclear understanding of the tools’ capabilities. To capture authentic behavior, we designed data collection methods that encouraged participants to share experiences organically, rather than recalling abstract or fragmented memories.
  3. Ethical and Privacy Concerns: Researching GenAI use involves sensitive information, including academic work, personal communication, and mental health. We prioritized methods that minimized risk of exposure, allowing participants to engage without worrying about their identities being revealed or their actions being judged.

MY RESEARCH APPROACH

As Project Lead and Primary Researcher:

  1. Designed an experimental study: Developed a 90-minute session based on the principles of participatory structured storytelling, inquiry, and persona creation.
  2. Facilitated the study: Conducted sessions with 30 Indian international students across 5 focus groups, recruited using purposive sampling.
  3. Human-in-the-loop data curation: Reviewed and curated a dataset of 500+ student narratives.
  4. Conducted thematic analysis: Synthesized 239 narratives into six thematic domains, revealing the key challenges that students address using Generative AI.
  5. Identified key features: Determined four features that make digital tools particularly appealing to international students.
  6. Evaluated user preferences: Analyzed what students like and dislike about the tools.
  7. Explored future tool design: Investigated how students envision the design of next-generation AI tools to better meet their needs.

INITIAL FINDIGS & DESING IMPLICATIONS

The findings from this study have directly informed a set of 15+ design recommendations for reimagining LLM tools to better support international student success, currently under review.

IMPACT & NEXT STEPS

The findings from this study have directly informed a set of 15+ design recommendations for reimagining LLM tools to better support international student success, currently under review.