Help Seeking in Math Class

¶ … Role of Motivation and Attitudes in Adolescents' Help Seeking in Math Class," Allison Ryan and Raul Pintrich examine the motivational influences on help-seeking behavior in math classrooms in the seventh and eighth grades. The article, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, investigates cognitive, motivational, and social influences on help-seeking behavior in math class to offer a fuller understanding of help-seeking behavior in general. The authors present the findings of their research clearly, explain their methodology well, and offer extensive background information, literature reviews, and suggestions for future research. The problem in question is clearly stated at the beginning of the article. Metacognitive skills greatly improve in adolescence, and students become more aware of when they need help with their work. However, research has shown that adolescents are not actively seeking help with their work when needed. The contradiction between the awareness of needing help and the avoidance of seeking help is the focus of the current study, as is clearly stated on the first page of the article. Furthermore, the authors take care to note that the problem deserves investigation and has a sound theoretical rationale. For example, they state that "when students don't garner help when it is needed they put themselves at a disadvantage for learning and performance," (329).

Review of literature is provided throughout the article, as needed, and the studies cited are always relevant to the current research. The authors begin by citing research regarding adolescent metacognitive skills in general and move on to provide the theoretical rationales for the present study: the decision to seek help in class is "filtered through a motivational-affective system that includes students' perceptions of competence, achievement goals, and attitudes," (329). These three factors: perceived cognitive and social competence; achievement goal orientation; and attitudes toward help-seeking, become the basis for the hypotheses of the current study. Prior research has shown that students who believe they are capable (perceived cognitive competence) are more likely to seek help, or less likely to avoid seeking help. Likewise, perceived social competence is positively related to help-seeking. Literature has also indicated that students who have task-focused goal orientation, or who perceive learning as an end in itself without regard to what others think, are also more likely to seek help or less likely to avoid help-seeking. Finally, a student's attitudes toward help-seeking behavior can mediate between competence and achievement goals in predicting help-seeking behavior in math class. All hypotheses are clearly stated in the paper, which is well-organized. For example, the authors state that perceived cognitive competence is "expected to be related to help-seeking behavior," (329). Ryan et al. also note that perceived social competence is predicted to be related to help-seeking. On page 331, the authors posit that task-focused goal orientation will be negatively correlated with the avoidance of help-seeking, whereas extrinsic and relative ability goal orientation will be positively correlated with the avoidance of help-seeking behavior.

Terms like "task-focused goals" and "extrinsic goals" are clarified on page 330. Task-focused goals are those in which learning is perceived as an end in itself. As such, task-focused goal orientation indicates that the student is internally motivated. In contrast, those with extrinsic goal orientation are concerned with external rewards or punishments such as approval from others. Likewise, relative ability goal orientation denotes the desire to achieve in relation to others, or the desire to outperform others.

In fact, the authors define all their terms clearly. "Avoidance of help seeking" is described as "instance when a student needs help but does not seek it," (329). On the same page, the authors define "adaptive help-seeking" as students asking for hints about the solution to a problem while still demonstrating independent learning. Perceived cognitive competence is defined on page 330 as "students' perceptions of their academic abilities."

The procedure or method of the current study is outlined and discussed at great length. First, the authors present an outline of their participant group, which consisted of 102 seventh and 101 eighth graders of both genders. Students were predominantly white and middle-class. All subjects were given questionnaires regarding perceived social and cognitive competence as well as attitudes regarding help-seeking. One of the weaknesses of the study that is not explicitly stated in the report is that the subject population was relatively homogenous and does not represent persons from a variety of socio-economic or ethnic groups. Moreover, the current study focuses on math class; results might have been different for different subjects. The researchers used three different types of data analyses: bivarate relationships; path analyses; and hierarchical multiple regressions. These statistical techniques and the results acquired by them are explicitly and clearly stated in the paper.