| Recently, the sense of academic help-seeking to students' learning attached increasing importance by educational psychologists. More and more relevant theories and researches treated help-seeking as an adaptive strategy for coping with difficulty and promoting mastery. Help-seeking may, however, take different forms, not all of which promote mastery. A student's help-seeking might reflect his dependence, and might be a indicator of independence too. What educators advocate is adaptive help-seeking, that is, instrumental help-seeking. Instrumental help-seeking is a regulatory strategy to one's social environment, with which students can solve their questions, achieve their goals and adapt themselves to circumstance. However, when facing difficulties in the classroom, some students often copy others' homework or give up quickly. The present study is to investigate factors affecting academic help-seeking, so that we can help students become active learners effectively.Achievement goal orientation is an indicator of a social-cognitive approach applied in studies about achievement motivations. Nowadays, many applied psychologists explain achievement motivations and achievement behaviors of individuals. They consider that human achievement motivations are not from objective realities, but from people's interpretations of them, which have a determination to people's achievement behaviors.Being an achievement-related behavior, academic help-seeking must be related to students' achievement motivations. Some studies indicated that students' achievement goal orientations could account much for their academic help-seeking. Academic help-seeking is not only a cognitive strategy, but also a social interaction between individuals. So, presumably, it could be affected by those social-psychological factors of individual and context. However, previous relevant researches had generally considered the goal orientations in one of two ways: first, as personal and second,as contextual. Besides these, few of those investigated media-factors between achievement goal orientations and help-seeking styles, and most of them only investigated students' general intentions to seek help, that is, whether they asked for help. So, if we want to make the relation between achievement goal orientations and help-seeking styles clearer, we need to look at the mediatory effect of students' attitudes about help-seeking between achievement goal orientations and their specific types of help seeking.Based on these, the present study has examined simultaneously the influence personal goal orientations and classroom goal orientations had on attitudes about academic help-seeking and help-seeking styles. And the relations among them have been examined as well.Data were collected via questionnaires administered to a sample of 493 adolescents from grade 7 and 8. Through ANOVA and Hierarchical Multiple Regression, The main findings from the present study are as follows:(1) Personal achievement goal orientations had significant effect on students' academic help-seeking. Of students with different goal orientations, the students with mastery goals perceived most benefits of help-seeking, but least costs. They used most instrumental help-seeking, and used least executive ones or had least intentions of help-avoidance. Compared with the ones with performance-approach goals, students with performance-avoidance goals perceived the more costs of help-seeking from teachers, used more executive help-seeking, and were more reluctance to seek help from others.(2) Classroom achievement goal orientations had significant effect on students' academic help-seeking. Compared with those who perceived mastery goals dominant in their classroom, students who thought performance goals dominant had lower belief about benefits of help-seeking and higher perceptions about costs of help seeking. And their intentions of instrumental help seeking were weaker, but they used more executivehelp-seeking or were less likely to ask for help.(3) Students' atti... |
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