Strategic Help Seeking: Implications for Learning and Teaching

The chapter has examined help seeking from a social-interactional perspective. If help seeking could be viewed solely from a "cold" cognitive perspective, understanding developmental and individual differences in its functioning would be less complicated. But raising one's hand, admitting difficulty or failure, and asking for help is a social-interactional exchange between people. It is also a very personal event that evokes anxiety in most Individuals at one time or another. Students make cognitive decisions about requesting help in the context of many different affective and motivational, as well as environmental, factors. Recognizing the "hot" nature of self-regulated learning in general, and of help seeking in particular, is essential for a better understanding of how to help students take a more active role in their own learning in the classroom.

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