Students' help seeking during problem solving: Influences of personal and contextual achievement goals.

Abstract

The author investigated how different types of achievement goals influence elementary school students' help seeking. Fourth and 5th graders were asked to solve math problems and were given the opportunity to request help from an adult. Goals were conceptualized on 2 nested dimensions: (a) locus of the goal (i.e., personal goals that students held at the beginning of the study vs. contextual goals that characterized the task situation) and (b) emphasis of the goal (i.e., the relative importance of learning vs. performance). Personal learning goals had a positive influence and personal performance goals had a negative influence on the frequency of confirmation requests and on actual problem solving. For students who had strong personal performance goals, a contextual learning goal resulted in more process-related help seeking than did a contextual performance goal. Both types of help seeking (i.e., confirmation and process-related requests) had a positive influence on problem solving. Interactions among goals are discussed.