Poster #12 - Comparing Children's Help-Seeking Intentions and Help-Seeking Behaviors During Learning

• In Event: Poster Session 12

Abstract

Introduction. The ability to actively seek help when students have difficulties understanding material is essential for learning (Nelson-Le Gall, 1981). Previous literature has often investigated help-seeking using different methods including task-based behaviors in younger children and self-reports in older children (Newman, 1990; Ryan et al., 2011). Therefore, we currently do not have a strong understanding of how help-seeking changes throughout childhood using the same methodology and whether self-reported intentions to seek help relate to objective help-seeking behaviors. The current study investigated help-seeking strategies in 8- to 13-year-olds using both self-report and task-based measures through an online task (see https://osf.io/mb8ug for pre-registration). We predicted a moderate correlation between observed and self-reported help-seeking based on previous research suggesting that children have metacognitive insight into their behaviors during middle childhood (Lyons & Ghetti, 2010).
Participants. The sample size consisted of 68 US children ages 8 to 13 recruited via online paid advertisements (Nfemales = 36; Mage = 10.8, SDage = 1.61).
Methods. Children completed an online memory task. During the encoding phase, children were presented with 36 facts about animals. During the practice test, children were asked to recall the animal facts and could seek help (in the form of a hint or the answer) or decide not to seek help. During the test phase, occurring ~24 hours later, children were asked to recall the animal facts without any help. After the task, children self-reported their general help-seeking tendencies using Likert-scale questions adapted from previous literature (Karabenick, 2003; Ryan & Shim, 2012) (e.g., “If I needed help, I would ask for hints or clues rather than the answer”, “Getting help when learning is a way to avoid doing some of the work.”)
Results. Help-seeking behaviors were measured as the proportion of overall help-seeking within the task, and the proportion of hints compared to answers sought. Children’s self-reports of help-seeking were measured as averaged responses across five categories including avoidance, approval, expedient, threat, and adaptive. We observed that children who sought more help in the task were also less likely to seek hints (r = -.27, p = .03). Children who self-reported higher rates of adaptive help-seeking also reported higher approval towards seeking help, (r = .29, p = .02), and were less likely to report seeking expedient help (e.g., seeking only answers) (r = -.28, p = .02), avoiding help (r = -.31, p = .01), or finding help to be threatening (e.g., feeling like a failure if they sought help) (r = -.29, p = .02). These results show consistent and significant correlations within measure types. However, we did not observe significant correlations between help-seeking behaviors and self-reported help-seeking (ps > .05). One relation between behavior and self-report measures approached significance such that children who reported high expedient help-seeking sought less task-based help (r=-.21, p = .09). These results suggest that children may have limited metacognitive insight into their help-seeking behaviors or that task-based behaviors may measure different aspects of help-seeking than self-reports.

Authors

• Grai Calabro, University of Colorado Colorado Springs
  Presenting Author

• Michelle Shields

• Diana Selmeczy, University of Colorado Colorado Springs