Middle School Students’ Behavior Of Academic Help-seeking: Its Relation To Study Attribution And Academic Self-efficacy

The purpose of education is more than knowledge. The development ofstudents is much more important than that. The Educator, Vgotsky, explainedhow does education help students to develop themselves with the theory ofZPD. When students get development, they have to solve difficulties whichthey can not figure out by their own without others’ help. So they must askother people for assistance. However, academic help-seeking is born at theright moment. A lot of psychologists and education workers have paidattention on it. Researcher also launched a full range of research, including itsdefinition, types, measuring, process, influencing factors and so on. The richachievements laid a solid foundation for further study. The purpose of the studyis to guide the practice. We should pay attention to why students showdifferent academic help-seeking behavior, because only when we get theanswer can we cure the case. In this study, We selected602middle and highschool students from cities and countrysides in Henan as subjects. We alsostudy the characteristics of middle school students’ academic help-seekingbehaviors and the differences on demographic variables. The influence ofacademic attribution and academic self-efficacy are discussed as the keypoints. The results show that:1.Instrumental help-seeking to classmates and executive help-seeking hassignificant gender differences. Girls on these behaviors are significantly more grade students are significant different on academic help seeking behavior;2.There has significant different on academic efficacy between thestudents from different sources. Academic efficacy of rural students issignificantly lower than urban students; There are significant differences ofoverall academic efficacy on grades, middle school students’ academicefficacy are significantly higher than high school;3. The study attribution do not exist significant differences on source andgender. Just has significant differences on grades. But the research showedthat students from different grades have unfixed attribution model, and theirattributions are still evolving;4.There has significant correlation between the academic success andfailure attribution、academic efficacy and academic help seeking. Instrumentalhelp-seeking to teacher has positive correlation with study abilitysel-efficacy、study behavior sel-efficacy and internal controllable attribution,and has negative correlation with internal uncontrollable attribution、externalcontrollable attribution and external uncontrollable attribution；Instrumentalhelp-seeking to classmate has positive correlation with study abilitysel-efficacy、study behavior sel-efficacy and internal controllable attribution,and has negative correlation with external controllable attribution andexternal uncontrollable attribution；Executive help-seeking、avoidance ofhelp-seeking behavior have negative correlation with study ability sel-efficacy、study behavior sel-efficacy and internal controllable attribution, and havepositive correlation with internal uncontrollable attribution、 externalcontrollable attribution and external uncontrollable attribution；Study abilitysel-efficacy has positive correlation with internal controllable attribution，andhas negative correlation with external controllable attribution、 external uncontrollable attribution；Study behavior sel-efficacy has positive correlationwith internal controllable attribution，and has negative correlation with internaluncontrollable attribution、 external controllable attribution、 externaluncontrollable attribution;5. Internal controllable attribution has significantly positive predictingeffect to instrumental help-seeking,and has significantly negative predictingeffect to executive help-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking behavior;Internal uncontrollable attribution、external controllable attribution、externaluncontrollable attribution have significantly positive predicting effect toinstrumental help-seeking,and have significantly negative predicting effect toexecutive help-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking behavior; Academicefficacy has significantly positive predicting effect to instrumentalhelp-seeking,and has significantly negative predicting effect to executivehelp-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking behavior; Internal controllableattribution has significantly positive predicting effect to academic efficacy；Internal uncontrollable attribution、external controllable attribution、externaluncontrollable attribution have significantly negative predicting effect toacademic self-efficacy.6. The study attribution can directly affect academic help-seeking andindirectly affect academic help-seeking through the mediation of academicself-efficacy.