Strategic Help Seeking: Implications for Learning and Teaching

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (1999), "Strategic Help Seeking: Implications for Learning and Teaching", Library Management, Vol. 20 No. 5, pp. 5-6. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm.1999.20.5.5.3

Erlbaum′s reputation for important and original research in fields like psychology is well known. This work follows in a good tradition and opens up recent research into help seeking in an authoritative and highly illuminating way. Karabenick (of Eastern Michigan University) has edited ten perceptive chapters here (writing two of them), and contributors (mainly American) keep up a high standard of focus, coherence, empirical authenticity, and relevance. Excellent up‐to‐date bibliographies accompany each chapter. The book is intended for specialists involved in instructional design and delivery in a variety of situations from classroom to user education or training programme, from school to university. Its implications have wider application for trainers generally in the workplace.

Help seeking has traditionally been associated with learning dependency, even dishonesty, and at best a mere coping strategy. Recent research reveals another picture: help seeking as a valuable adaptive self‐regulating proactive learning strategy. Help seeking is critical in any active effective learning. It argues that self‐regulated (or meta‐cognitive, i.e. reflecting on one′s own learning processes) learners, in school and college, have purposeful control over learning outcomes. Help seeking is a complex process, and perhaps for this reason is only now being understood. In a wealth of psychological, sociological, and educational research, the book demonstrates how help seeking brings together cognitive (e.g. learning and knowing), affective (e.g. beliefs and attitudes such as self‐esteem and motivation to learn), and social‐interactional factors (say in the classroom or the study group).

Studying help seeking shows teachers, lecturers, librarians involved in user education or training, and many others just how many things are at work to encourage or discourage help seeking: the student may perceive herself to be incompetent, the classroom culture may discourage asking questions, asking questions may be seen to be a sign of stupidity, students may not ask for help because they are simply not interested or because they do not know enough even to formulate the questions. Experienced teachers and communicators will recognise all these signs. The book provides a convincing, coherent and helpful analysis of the issues. It offers a vocabulary of useful concepts and ideas for defining and evaluating deeper levels of help seeking: how learners deal with perplexity, how they make the decision to ask for help, whether task‐ orientated groups encourage help seeking more than ego‐orientated ones.

Different help seeking styles appear to exist ‐‐ autonomous (i.e. getting help so that we can solve our own problem) and dependent (i.e. simply getting help). All these are affected by relationships, personalities, cognition and feelings. There are gender differences (women use dependent styles more than do men, men use help seeking instrumentally in their search for task mastery). There are cultural differences, too: the book contrasts individualistic Western cultures, like the USA, with social milieux where collaboration and group norms are emphasised more (like Japan). All these insights, controversial in themselves, are supported by valid applied research ‐‐ into Afro‐Americans or Japanese learners in the classroom. Learning styles vary, from entity‐based styles (emphasising learning for mastery) to increment‐based styles (where the process matters more, where skills are expendable through effort). Often, help seeking is influenced both by extrinsic factors (like how encouraging the teacher is to students who ask questions) and intrinsic factors (like personality, motivation, the wish merely to surface learn something so as to pass).

An interesting dimension for information specialists is what the authors say about information processing itself. With computers, online and the Internet, help seeking can be regarded as part of the information seeking process, and the work of writers like Kuhlthau, Belkin and Dervin are rightly cited as seminal here for understanding question formulation. Yet the book will have a wide appeal to researchers, teachers and lecturers, instructional designers and library/information managers involved in designing information systems and delivering information instruction. Above all it lays to rest the hangover from deficit learning models, that learners who ask a lot of questions must be dumb: OK, there are such things as learned passivity and sneaky opportunism, low esteem and social avoidance, neurotic coping and competitive secretiveness, but it really is about time teachers, lecturers, instructional designers and trainers left behind the idea that asking questions merely wastes time: the best kind of help seeking takes place when learners are really active and when they attribute the most value to their teachers. A good example of where current research really does have something permanently sensible to say about practice. Erlbaum triumphs again