Academic Help-Seeking

Abstract

Academic help-seeking is an important learning strategy that students use to solve difficult problems and problems that they do not understand. The goal of the present study was to examine how students' motivation (achievement goal orientations and perceptions of competence) influences 3 styles of academic help-seeking (adaptive help-seeking, dependent help-seeking, and avoidance of help-seeking) through the students' attitudes about seeking help from others. Two models (a teacher acting as helper, or peer helpers) were constructed and compared in this study by means of a questionnaire on the former, which was given to 169 junior high school students (81 males, 88 females), and on the latter, to 164 junior high school students (82 males, 82 females). The results showed that mastery goal orientation indirectly influenced adaptive help-seeking through students' feeling of being useless. Conversely, performance goal orientation and cognitive competence indirectly influenced dependent help-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking through the students' uncertainty and feelings of inferiority about their own competence. In contrast, performance goal orientation had an indirect positive influence on adaptive help-seeking when an autonomous attitude (solving a problem on one's own) was applied indirectly through mediation. A comparison of students' responses to questions asking about a teacher acting as helper, or peer helpers, showed that there were some significant differences in the effect of perceptions of competence.View full abstract