Selecting the Most Important Predictors of College Students' Online Help-Seeking Behaviors

• In Event: 44.056 - Student Experiences of Online Help-Seeking and Online Learning

Abstract

This study investigated the most important predictors of college students’ online help-seeking behaviors. 203 computer science students from a large university in southeastern United States participated in the study. The online help-seeking behavior this study particularly focused on was online searching for help seeking. Ten-fold cross validation was used to select the most significant predictors from eight potential factors, including prior knowledge of the learning subject, learning proficiency level, academic performance, epistemological belief, interests, problem difficulty, age and gender. Learning proficiency level, epistemological belief, academic performance, and problem difficulty were selected as most important predictors for online searching. The study provides guidance on targeted training of online searching and instructional designs involving online searching.

Authors

• Qiang Hao, Western Washington University

• Robert C. Branch, University of Georgia

• Ewan Wright, University of Hong Kong