Personal and contextual determinants of ethnically diverse female high school students’ patterns of academic help seeking and help avoidance in English and mathematics☆
Research highlights
► Expectancy for success, task value, mastery goals predict help seeking. ► Metacognitive self-regulation and rehearsal also found to predict help seeking. ► More variance explained in help seeking than help avoidance. ► No effects of ethnicity or grade level found.
Introduction
Contemporary research on motivation and self-regulated learning is primarily social-cognitive in nature, with an emphasis on the role of students’ beliefs, perceptions, and strategies (Maehr & Zusho, 2009). Accordingly, motivation and self-regulated learning are assumed to be discernable through students’ reports of their beliefs and strategies as well as through behaviors such as choice of activities, level and quality of task engagement, persistence, and performance. The social-cognitive approach also underscores the multi-dimensional nature of such processes, and examines how motivation and strategy-use are influenced by broader factors. In other words, emphasis is placed on the process of learning, and on understanding the factors, both personal and contextual, that influence how an individual approaches, engages in, and responds to achievement-related situations.
More often than not, indices of self-regulation focus on the regulation of cognition, and assess the various cognitive and metacognitive strategies that students report using (Pintrich & De Groot, 1990). In the current study, we highlight another important type of self-regulation, namely help seeking, which has received increasing attention given its important role in the learning process (Karabenick and Newman, 2006, Karabenick and Newman, 2009). Research on help seeking to date has focused primarily on understanding the personal and situational determinants of whether, for what reasons, and from whom students seek help when they encounter academic difficulties (Butler, 1998, Karabenick, 1998, Karabenick, 2004, Karabenick and Knapp, 1991, Nelson-Le Gall, 1981, Nelson-Le Gall, 1985, Newman, 1990, Newman, 1991, Newman, 1994, Newman, 1998, Newman, 2000, Ryan et al., 1998). The current study follows this tradition by considering the role of both enduring and potentially malleable factors linked to help seeking in a sample of ethnically diverse female high school students. More specifically, emphasis is placed on exploring how students’ patterns of help seeking vary across subject domains (English vs. mathematics).
Section snippets
Historical background and operationalization
Research on help seeking is still relatively new with systematic and theory-driven research only emerging in the 1980s (Butler, 2006). This early work painted help seeking in a rather negative light; as antithetical to the prevailing American ethos of rugged individualism, and consequently, as a form of passive dependency. Moreover, emphasis was placed on understanding the antecedents of why individuals did not seek help (Butler, 2006, Karabenick and Newman, 2009).
This line of inquiry suggested
Overview of current study
Newman (2006) suggests that a better understanding of help seeking necessitates consideration of: (a) achievement goals, (b) a more precise operationalization of adaptive help seeking, as well as (c) the role of contextual factors. In line with such recommendations, and also following the general trend in psychology toward more interactionist perspectives and models (Lau and Nie, 2008, Linnenbrink, 2005, Magnusson and Cairns, 1996, Pintrich, 2003), the current study examined both personal and
Participants
Participants (N = 293) were high school students from a small, urban, private, all female high school in a large metropolitan city in the Northeast. All students who were present on the day of survey administration participated in the study. The sample was ethnically diverse: Latina (44%), Caucasian (31%), African American (18%), and Asian/Asian-American (7%). Approximately equal number of students participated across all four grades: 9th grade (n = 81), 10th grade (n = 73), 11th grade (n = 74), and
Factor analyses
A series of exploratory factor analyses with principal axis factoring and oblimin rotation were conducted on all major scales of interest. More specifically, five sets of factor analyses were conducted by domain: (1) analysis on the motivational scales of expectancy for success and task value; (2) analysis on the cognitive and metacognitive strategy-use scales; (3) analysis on the goal orientation scales; (4) analysis on the general cognitive beliefs items (i.e., procrastination, need for
Discussion
The purpose of this study was threefold. First, we explored how well the various motivational and cognitive measures predicted patterns of help seeking and help avoidance across the domains of English and mathematics. Second, we investigated how well the self-report measures predicted a behavioral measure of help seeking, namely after-school tutoring attendance. Third, we examined whether discernable patterns of help seeking could be detected across grade levels, ethnicity, and subject-domain.
Conclusions
Research conducted over almost three decades has corroborated help seeking as an important strategy for attaining success in school (Karabenick and Newman, 2008, Karabenick and Newman, 2009). The ability to engage others as a resource is a positive coping mechanism that enables students to more effectively deal with difficult and ambiguous learning contexts (Ryan et al., 1998). Unfortunately, the literature is replete with cases of students who need academic help but are often reluctant to seek
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A previous version of this study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego. We thank the administrators, teachers, and students who made this study possible. We are also grateful to Fran Blumberg, the editor, and three anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally helpful comments on a previous draft.