Scaffolding Metacognition with GenAI: Exploring Design Opportunities to Support Task Management for University Students with ADHD

2026-02-10

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges faced by university students with ADHD in self-regulated learning, particularly due to deficits in metacognitive capacity that hinder effective task management. Through co-design sessions and interviews with 20 students diagnosed with ADHD and five domain experts, the research explores how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can support task management from a metacognitive perspective. The work proposes three key design directions: providing cognitive scaffolds to enhance awareness of tasks and the self, fostering reflective task execution to cultivate metacognitive skills, and offering support for emotion regulation to sustain engagement. Findings reveal significant opportunities for GenAI to meet the metacognitive needs of neurodiverse learners and offer both theoretical grounding and practical pathways for designing intelligent assistive tools tailored to students with ADHD.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Search and Optimization: Metareasoning and Metaheuristics
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Adaptive Behavior

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Uses of LLMs and GenAI for marketplace design, bidding, and strategic interactions
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

For university students transitioning to an independent and flexible lifestyle, having ADHD poses multiple challenges to their academic task management, which are closely tied to their metacognitive struggles--difficulties in awareness and regulation of one's own thinking processes. The recently surged Generative AI shows promise to mitigate these gaps with its advanced information understanding and generation capabilities. As an exploratory step, we conducted co-design sessions with 20 university students diagnosed with ADHD, followed by interviews with five experts specialized in ADHD intervention. Adopting a metacognitive lens, we examined participants'ideas on GenAI-based task management support and experts'assessments, which led to three design directions: providing cognitive scaffolding to enhance task and self-awareness, promoting reflective task execution for building metacognitive abilities, and facilitating emotional regulation to sustain task engagement. Drawing on these findings, we discuss opportunities for GenAI to support the metacognitive needs of neurodivergent populations, offering future directions for both research and practice.

Problem

• ADHD
• task management
• metacognition
• university students
• cognitive challenges

Innovation

• Generative AI
• Metacognition
• ADHD
• Cognitive Scaffolding
• Task Management