Rs. Newman, Students' help seeking during problem solving: Influences of personal and contextual achievement goals, J EDUC PSYC, 90(4), 1998, pp. 644-658
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 t
he goal (i.e., personal goals that students held at the beginning of the st
udy vs. contextual goals that characterized the task situation) and (b) emp
hasis of the goal (i.e., the relative importance of learning vs. performanc
e). Personal learning goals had a positive influence and personal performan
ce goals had a negative influence on the frequency of confirmation requests
and on actual problem solving. For students who had strong personal perfor
mance goals, a contextual learning goal resulted in more process-related he
lp seeking than did a contextual performance goal. Both types of help seeki
ng (i.e., confirmation and process-related requests) had a positive influen
ce on problem solving. Interactions among goals are discussed.