Cognitive-Motivational Influences on the Task-Related Help-Seeking Behavior of Black Children

Abstract

The present study examined the relation between children's mastery motivation, self-assessment of performance, and task-related help-seeking behavior during task performance. Average-achieving black American children, varying in mastery motivation as measured by subscales of the Harter's Intrinsic-Extrinsic Orientation in the Classroom Scale, performed a multitrial verbal task and were given the opportunity to seek help on each trial after making a tentative response and assessing their performance by rating their confidence in the correctness of the response. A response-contingent payoff system was implemented to encourage children to restrict their help seeking to those instances in which they perceived that they could not make a correct response without assistance. As predicted, children's self-assessments of performance, regardless of their accuracy, appeared to influence help seeking more than the actual performance outcomes. Neither children's self-assessments of performance nor their overall rate of help seeking varied with level of measured mastery motivation. However, the type of help sought varied as expected with mastery motivation. Children characterized by high intrinsic orientations toward independent mastery in academic achievement contexts sought indirect help (i.e., hints) more often than they sought direct help (i.e., answers), whereas children characterized by low intrinsic orientations toward independent mastery showed no preference. These differences in motivational orientation influenced requests for help only when children perceived their initial solutions to be incorrect. These findings are discussed in the context of the analyses of help seeking as an instrumental learning and achievement strategy. The implications of the findings for analyses of black children's achievement styles are highlighted.