Senior Middle School Students' Academic Help-Seeking: Its Relation To Achievement Goal Orientation And Sense Of Self-Efficacy

This survey is based on the study of 562 senior middle school students, and it adopts the sense of self-efficacy scale, academic help-sccking attitude scale and academic help-seeking behavior scale which were all designed by Li Xiaodong, and the achievement goal orientation scale by Liu Huijun. It studies the relations between senior middle school students' demography variable, academic achievement, sense of self-efficacy, achievement goal orientation and academic help- seeking in mathematics, in the hope of promoting theoretic and practical suggestions for the middle school education.The results of the survey show that the academic help-seeking attitude and behavior varies a great deal from different schools, grades, genders as well as liberal arts and science classes among the senior middle school students: those from the better schools, or lower grades, or science classes, especially girls have deeper understandings toward the benefits of help-seeking, thus they have more instrumental help-seeking deeds; in the contrary, those from the ordinary schools, higher grades, liberal arts classes, especially boys have deeper understandings toward the costs of help-seeking, so they are inclined to executive help-seeking or avoidance of help-seeking. The correlations between the academic achievement and the academic help-seeking attitude and behavior are significant. Both the achievement goal orientation and the sense of self-efficacy have some effects on predicting students' academic help-seeking attitude and behavior. The path analysis of deeper level shows that the achievement goal orientation and sense of self-efficacy not only have direct impact on the academic help-seeking behavior, but also influence it indirectly by the academic help-seeking attitude, which works as a mediation variable.