Help Seeking in Academic Settings

Goals, Groups, and Contexts

Stuart A. Karabenick, Richard S. Newman, Stuart A. Karabenick, Richard S. Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135810511
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Building on Karabenick's earlier volume on this topic and maintaining its high standards of scholarship and intellectual rigor, Help Seeking in Academic Settings: Goals, Groups, and Contexts brings together contemporary work that is theoretically as well as practically important. It highlights current trends in the area and gives expanded attention to applications to teaching and learning. The contributors represent an internationally recognized group of scholars and researchers who provide depth of analysis and breadth of coverage.

Help seeking is currently considered an important learning strategy that is linked to students' achievement goals and academic performance. This volume not only provides answers to who, why, and when learners seek help, but raises questions for readers to consider for future research. Chapters examine:
*help seeking as a self-regulated learning strategy and its relationship to achievement goal theory;
*help seeking in collaborative groups;
*culture and help seeking in K-12 and college contexts;
*help seeking and academic support services (such as academic advising centers);
*help seeking in computer-based interactive learning environments;
*help seeking in response to peer harassment at school; and
*help seeking in non-academic settings such as the workplace.

This book is intended for researchers, academic support personnel,and graduate students across the field of educational psychology, particularly those interested in student motivation and self-regulation.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Stuart A. Karabenick
University of Michigan & Eastern Michigan University

When learners have trouble understanding text material, solving problems or completing assignments, they often rely on such strategies as rereading a text more slowly, organizing class notes, reviewing previous work, or searching for information available online. If these efforts are ineffective they may also turn to teachers, classmates, friends, or parents for assistance. Examples can range from very young children who ask adults for help placing letters into simple alphabet cutout puzzles to high school students' appeals to classmates for the correct solutions to quadratic equations. Until recently, such relianceon others was considered of little value and even stigmatized, with the admonition that truly independent learners are not supposed to need others to succeed. This pejorative view has changed, however. Recent theoretical developments and research indicate instead that help seeking can be an important self-regulated learning strategy, an essential implement in mature learners' “tool kits,” and an activity engaged in by more motivated and better performing students (e.g., Butler, 1998; Karabenick, 1998, 2004; Karabenick & Knapp, 1991; Nelson-Le Gall & Resnick, 1998; Newman, 2000; Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1990).

Evidence of this change in perspective—that seeking help can be an adaptive strategy—is suggested by its inclusion in elementary school report cards (e.g., “seeks help when needed”), in literature that advises parents about ways to foster their children's motivation and involvement in learning (e.g., Edwards, 2003), and in college students' study skills curricula (e.g., Collins-Eaglin & Karabenick, 1991, 1992; Vanderstoep & Pintrich, 2003). Help seeking has also been listed among the most important activities that contribute to university student success (University of Texas at Austin: www.utexas.edu/student/utlc/). In the chapters to follow, most discussions of this contemporary view acknowledge the identification by Nelson-Le Gall and her colleagues (Nelson-Le Gall, 1981, 1987, 1992; Nelson-Le Gall, Gumerman, & Scott-Jones, 1983) of instrumental help seeking (also called autonomous, adaptive, or strategic help seeking) as an important developmental skill. Unlike executive (also called expedient or excessive) help seeking, which is effort-avoidant, unnecessary, and perpetuates dependency, the goal of instrumental help seeking involves improving one's capabilities or increasing one's understanding, which can lead to greater autonomy. Although it is important to encourage learners to seek help, therefore, this functional distinction suggests that not all forms of help seeking are equally desirable.

In many respects, help seeking is similar to other self-regulated learning strategies that can improve knowledge and skill acquisition (e.g., rehearsal, organization, and elaboration). Learners must know how to use them (i.e., strategic knowledge) and when they are most appropriate; they also require the expenditure of resources (e.g., time and effort). There are also important differences, however, that fall into three general categories. One dis- tinctive feature is that, unlike other strategies (e.g., rehearsal), help seeking can imply inadequacy and threaten self-worth (Covington, 1992; Nadler, 1983, 1998). Second, seeking help implies a social-interactive process (Newman, 2000) that can expose learners to public scrutiny. Being judged less capable by teachers, other students, or anyone in an evaluative position could be embarrassing (Shapiro, 1983). Third, seeking help can incur indebtedness to those providing it, creating the obligation to return the favor or provide some other form of compensation, except in cases where the help provided is role related (e.g., from an academic advisor or teacher) and such return favors are not expected. Individually or in combination, these costs can completely discourage students and other learners from seeking needed help (Fisher, Nadler, & Whitcher-Alagna, 1982), and consequently perceived costs have been the subject of numerous investigations. As for early influences, developmental research indicates that younger learners become increasingly aware of the price they could pay for seeking help, especially during whole-class activities. However, not until middle school with its greater emphasis on performance do perceived costs begin to affect their help-seeking decisions (Newman, 1990). Establishing adaptive learning environments involves understanding and reducing classroom and school practices that engender negative outcomes that inhibit help seeking as well as other self-regulated learning practices.

Consistent with other areas of self-regulated learning, achievement goal theory has framed much of this research (e.g., Karabenick, 2003, 2004; Midgley, 2002; Ryan, 1998). Achievement goals are the purposes or reasons for engaging in achievement behavior (Kaplan, Middleton, Urdan, & Midgley, 2002). Goals are relevant because of their implications for the meaning of help seeking and can influence the value of its benefits and costs. As discussed in several contributions to the present volume, achievement goal orientations include mastery approach (a focus on learning and improvement, also called learning or task goals) and performance goals (also called ego or ability goals). Performance goals have been differentiated into performance approach (doing better than others) and performance avoid (not doing worse than others) orientations (Church, Elliot, & Gable, 2001; Harackiewicz, Barron, Pintrich, Elliot, & Thrash, 2002; Midgley, 2002; Pintrich, 2000a, 2000b; Skaalvik, 1997). Results of several studies indicate that for mastery-oriented learners, seeking help is viewed more positively as a way to improve and gain greater understanding—help from others represents another learning resource. By contrast, because of concerns about their abilities, having to seek help is more threatening for performance-oriented learners. Goal orientations also have different implications depending on the type of help: Mastery-oriented students are more likely to seek instrumental/autonomous help when needed, whereas those higher in performance approach and avoid goal orientations are more likely to avoid seeking help or to seek expedient help when they do (Arbreton, 1993, 1998; Butler & Neuman, 1995; Karabenick, 2003, 2004; Newman, 1991, 1994; Ryan, Hicks, & Midgley, 1997; Ryan & Pintrich, 1997).

In addition to personal orientations, achievement goal theory has also framed studies of learning contexts (e.g., classroom goal structure; Midgley, 2002). In accordance with a social-cognitive approach, context is typically assessed by student self-reports of teachers' intentional or inadvertent communications (e.g., Ryan, 1998; Ryan, Gheen, & Midgley, 1998; Turner et al., 2002). Considerable evidence indicates that associations between perceived goal structures and help seeking parallel those with students' personal goal orientations. At the individual level of analysis (i.e., ignoring differences between classes), students who perceive a greater emphasis on mastery goals are more likely to engage in instrumental/adaptive help seeking, whereas students who perceive classes as more performance focused tend to be more help-seeking avoidant. With regard to between-class differences, evidence also indicates that students in elementary school classes that they collectively perceive to be more mastery, or less performance, focused are less likely to avoid seeking needed help (Linnenbrink, 2005; Ryan, 1998; Ryan et al., 1998; Turner et al., 2002). And there is evidence that performance avoid goals are especially important for older learners. Specifically, college students in classes with greater perceived emphasis on performance-avoid goals felt themselves more threatened by help seeking and indicated they were less likely to seek it when needed (Karabenick, 2004). In summary, students' intentions to seek needed help depend both on how students perceive the classroom achievement goal structure and on their personal achievement goal orientations. Thus, increasing the likelihood of seeking needed help depends on reducing the perceived costs engendered when learners are concerned about not being as capable or performing worse than others.

Important for interpreting the effects of achievement goals and other influences is understanding the relation between help seeking and need. Although the effects of need would appear straightforward, the association is more complex and depends on how help seeking is assessed. To begin, need is a critical juncture in models of the help-seeking process (e.g., Gross & McMullen, 1983). Accordingto these models, the help-seeking process is set in motion by a precipitating event, such as receiving a low exam grade; next, learners decide whether they need help. Doing so depends on several factors, which include causal attributions for the event that are help-relevant (e.g., that blame poor performance on lack of effort rather than lack of ability, bad luck, or prejudicial grading practices; Ames, 1983) and the proper calibration of need (Nelson-Le Gall, Kratzer, Jones, & DeCooke, 1990; Newman & Schwager, 1993). Once learners decide help is needed, the remainder of the process follows (e.g., deciding whether to seek help, selecting the source of help). The models recognize that the sequence may not be unidirectional (e.g., deciding on a source could precede the decision to seek help). They also acknowledge that learners may skip steps, or at least be unaware of them. For example, to account for executive (expedient) help seeking, the model would have to provide a path for help seeking in the absenceofneed (Nelson-Le Gall, 1987; Newman, this volume, chap. 9).

In addition to whether the presence or absence of need determines the kind of help seeking that occurs (i.e., instrumental/autonomous or executive/expedient), the level of need must be known (or assumed) when interpreting the presence or absence of help seeking itself. Consider the frequent experience of teachers asking, “Are there any questions?” Although the presence of questions can represent help seeking, their absence is ambiguous without knowing, or making assumptions about, whether students have understood the material. Disparaging student passivity (Good, Slavings, Harel, & Emerson, 1987) requires the assumption that students lacked comprehension but failed to seek needed help. An (ideal?) alternative is that students did not need to ask—that the material was so well organized and presented that everyone understood it. In the case of help seeking, in other words, such techniques as classroom observations alone may not be unambiguously informative (as would observing other behavior such as time on task). This is more than an incidental methodological matter but rather important for an adequate understanding of help-seeking research.

Most help-seeking research in instructional contexts (including that described in subsequent chapters) relies on self-reported help seeking as a proxy for direct observations. Self-reported help seeking has the advantage, especially for older learners whose experiences extend beyond the classroom, of sampling a wide range of learning contexts, but, as with direct observations, the level of need must still be taken into consideration when interpreting the results (see Karabenick & Knapp, 1991). In one study that examined the relationship between need and help seeking, college students reported both the incidenceof their academic help seeking fromavariety of sources (e.g., teachers, advisors) and the level of help they needed during the term (Karabenick & Knapp, 1988a). Interestingly, reported help seeking was not a direct function of the need for help. Highest rates of help seeking were instead reported at moderate levels ofneed and lowest at either very high or very low need levels. Low rates of help seeking by very needy students supported the generalization that those most in need are less likely to seek it, presumably because of their low levels of motivation or self-threat induced avoidance. The infrequency of self-reported help seeking by high-performing students with low need is explicable (i.e., they didn't need help) but, as with direct observation, leaves unresolved what those students would have done if they needed help.

Controlling the level of need is one way to approach the problem. In experimental studies, appropriate conditions are established by such techniques as presenting difficult tasks or norms that indicate relatively poor performance. There are two strategies used with self-reported help seeking. One involves assessing and statistically controlling for need when determining relations between help seeking and other variables (e.g., help seeking and students' use of other learning strategies; Karabenick & Knapp, 1991). Another approach relies on responses to statements that are need conditional—asking learners what they would do if they needed help. In essence, this conditional approach measures behavioral intentions under specified conditions, which have been closely linked to actual behavior when assessing attitudes in myriad areas (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). With the exception of studies that rely heavily on extensive process observations and qualitative analyses (see Webb et al. in chap. 3 and Kempler & Linnenbrink in chap. 4), the preponderance of contemporary learning-related help-seeking research has adopted this approach. Taking need into consideration, and the distinction between behavior and intentions, aids in understanding the seeming contradiction that more motivated and better performing students may be less likely to seek help (because they need it less) but more likely to seek more adaptive help when needed.

CURRENT CONTRIBUTIONS

Although not formally divided into sections, the following chapters sequentially focus on goals, groups, and contexts. The achievement goals framework is extensively discussed in the next chapter. Two chapters that follow are devotedtohelp seeking and group processes (collaborative and cooperative learning). Attention then shifts to several contexts that include help seeking: as affected by culture among international students and in noneducational organizations; in academic advising and support services; in computer-based interactive learning environments; and adaptive responses to threat (i.e., bullying).

We begin in chapter 2 with Ruth Butler's explication of the transition from help seeking as necessarily dependent to a potentially strategic and adaptive form of behavior. Achievement goal theory is then reviewed articulated with her proposed set of help-seeking orientations (autonomous, ability-focused, and expedient) and their implications for help-seeking behavior. Achievement goals and help-seeking orientations are use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 An Achievement Goal Perspective on Student Help Seeking and Teacher Help Giving in the Classroom: Theory, Research, and Educational Implications
• 3 Help Seeking in Cooperative Learning Groups
• 4 Helping Behaviors in Collaborative Groups in Math: A Descriptive Analysis
• 5 Help Seeking in Cultural Context
• 6 When Is Seeking Help Appropriate? How Norms Affect Help Seeking in Organizations
• 7 Help Seeking and the Role of Academic Advising in Higher Education
• 8 Help Seeking in Higher Education Academic Support Services
• 9 Students' Adaptive and Nonadaptive Help Seeking in the Classroom: Implications for the Context of Peer Harassment
• 10 Toward Computer-Based Tutoring of Help-Seeking Skills
• 11 Implications and Future Research: Where Do We Go From Here?
• Author Index
• Subject Index