Development of Help-Seeking
September 21st, 2009
Help! How do I…?
The use of help features in computer-based learning has been an issue of recent research. Learning outcomes appear to be at least partially dependent on available support, and help-seeking on the part of students is seen as a positive sign of self-regulated learning. How do students ask for help? Are there developmental changes in this asking?
These were the questions explored by Minna Puustinen and colleagues in a recent article in Computers & Education. They examined 206 messages sent by middle school students via an online forum to math tutors.
The questions were coded based on whether they included:
- A description of the problem the student was trying to solve
- Explicit request for help
- Signs of preliminary personal work
- Openings
- Closings
- Student introduction/ identity
- Context (e.g., “I’m working on homework”)
- Politeness markers
The results indicated clear differences in the complexity of the help requests across grades. More than half of 6th graders’ messages only included one of the above categories, while 70% of the 9th graders’ messages contained three to six of the categories. Examination of the frequency of categories indicated that older students’ messages were more likely to contain context-related information and explicit requests for help. These results indicate that the messages of younger students do not seem to contain enough information to receive help (a description of the problem and explicit request for help would appear to be a minimum).
The implications of these findings are interesting. First, when designing computer-based lessons for the middle school age group, the changing nature of their help requests must be taken into account. They are not, in fact, a homogeneous group in this arena. For younger students, specific prompts might be given for the types of information needed in order to get the most from a help session. In a computer-based help situation, younger students may need scaffolding about the kinds of information they need to search for. I think the developmental implications are interesting here… is this a phenomenon related to taking another’s point of view?
I just used an online help chat feature with a problem I was having with the Ebay site, at least I would get marks for opening, closing, and politeness. I wonder what analysis of a bunch of those transcripts would look like for adults!
Puustinen, M., Volckaert-Legrier, O., Coquin, D., & Bernicot, J. (2009). An analysis of students’ spontaneous computer-mediated help seeking: A step toward the design of ecologically valid supporting tools Computers & Education, 53 (4), 1040-1047 DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2008.10.003
Tags: eLearning, help
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