Students do not always use available help to accomplish their goals in an academic environment. Traditionally, academic help-seeking has been viewed as an act of dependence involving a public interaction between a student and a teacher or peer. Recent advances in technology have led to the re-conceptualization of help-seeking as a private act that supports independent achievement goals. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two treatments that promote task involvement, task-involving instructions and instructor modeling on help-seeking behavior. Help-seeking behavior was defined as the number of times a student accessed program help while learning to use a programming system. It was hypothesized that students who received either the task-involving instruction treatment, the instructor modeling treatment or a combination of these treatments would seek more program help than students who received traditional instructions without instructor modeling. / Three instructors and a total of 106 technical professionals employed by an information technology company participated in this study. Students were grouped into eight classes that were open for registration by any technical employee through a computer registration system. Employees registered themselves for class dates and locations and classes were assigned to instructors. Two different instructors were assigned to each condition in this study. / The research was conducted as a 2 $\times$ 2 quasi-experimental design with four possible conditions. The treatment effects for help-seeking were analyzed using the two-way analysis of variance procedure. A main effect was supported for the instructor modeling treatment, F(1,102) = 18.32, p $<$.05. The results indicate that students who received the instructor modeling treatment sought more program help than students who did not receive instructor modeling. / This study suggests that instructor modeling may be an appropriate strategy to promote academic help-seeking. Educators should consider the effects of task-involving strategies on the attitudes associated with help-seeking behavior. Teachers can affect these attitudes and enhance the learning experience by modeling the use of program help to answer questions or solve problems. Future research should investigate relationships between increased help-seeking and other indicators of learning and performance. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-11, Section: A, page: 4364. / Major Professor: John M. Keller. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77578 |
| Contributors | Cuevas, Anthony Gerard., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 79 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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