CHI 2026Barcelona, Spain · April 13–17, 2026

Scaffolding Metacognition
with GenAI

Exploring Design Opportunities to Support Task Management for University Students with ADHD

Zihao Zhu1 Junnan Yu2 Yuhan Luo1, *
1 Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong 2 School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

* Corresponding author: Yuhan Luo

Paper Video DOI arXiv Slides
Research framework mapping organization, execution, and adjustment to metacognitive challenges and opportunities for GenAI support, including task and self-awareness, reflective task execution, emotional regulation, and contextual adaptivity.
Task management, metacognitive challenges, and opportunities for GenAI support.View full size

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.

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Published by ACM SIGCHI.

Authors

Zihao Zhu

Zihao Zhu

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong

Junnan Yu

Junnan Yu

Assistant Professor

School of Design
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Yuhan Luo

Yuhan Luo

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong

* Corresponding author: Yuhan Luo

Acknowledgments

We thank our participants for their time and valuable contributions to this study. We also thank the reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. This research was supported by City University of Hong Kong (#7020106).

Citing this work

Zihao Zhu, Junnan Yu, and Yuhan Luo. 2026. Scaffolding Metacognition with GenAI: Exploring Design Opportunities to Support Task Management for University Students with ADHD. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13–17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790697

BibTeX
Download .bib 
@inproceedings{zhu2026scaffolding,
  author    = {Zhu, Zihao and Yu, Junnan and Luo, Yuhan},
  title     = {Scaffolding Metacognition with {GenAI}: Exploring Design Opportunities to Support Task Management for University Students with {ADHD}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  series    = {CHI '26},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address   = {New York, NY, USA},
  pages     = {1--24},
  numpages  = {24},
  doi       = {10.1145/3772318.3790697},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790697}
}