Are Students Aware of How Much Help They Need? The Relationship Between Awareness, Help Seeking, and Self-assessment

Abstract

Facilitating students to become better self-regulated learners is a grand challenge in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) research. Help-seeking (HS) and self-assessment (SA) are important in self-regulated learning. The literature has shown that students tend to have maladaptive HS behavior, e.g., overuse hints or not use hints when appropriate. Furthermore, student SAs of domain knowledge have been shown to be inaccurate a priori and persistently overconfident. Together these beckon the question of whether students are aware of how much help they need. To investigate this, 115 students in two introductory college statistics courses completed the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) questionnaire and completed a homework assignment in an ITS. Students with above-average MAAS scores used fewer hints, more accurately estimated the number of hints they would request on the subsequent similar question, and more accurately recalled the number of hints used on the previous question. However, differences in MAAS scores did not influence the number of errors made, nor the recall or prediction of errors. We contribute to the literature by showing how MAAS scores relate to HS and SA in ITS.