Academic Help Seeking as a Self-Regulated Learning Strategy

Theory and research have indicated that adaptive help seeking is facilitated when learners possess a series of cognitive/metacognitive, emotional, and social competencies at each stage of the help-seeking process. This chapter discusses a Zimmerman self-regulation model that implies that help seeking should be directly related to the learners' perceived need for help. Understanding the relation between need and help seeking was advanced by research that focused on statistically controlling for need levels or the use of conditional likelihood estimates. Source considerations can play an important role in the decision to seek help. Early studies of academic help seeking focused on the distinction between informal and formal sources and their impact on learners' perceived benefits and costs of seeking help. Most research on motivation and help seeking has adopted achievement goal theory, although recent research has begun to focus on expectancy-value theory. At the individual level, achievement goal orientations have been consistently associated with student help seeking.