Strategic Help Seeking : Implications for Learning and Teaching

In this volume we present work by the major contemporary contributors to the help-seeking literature. Authors were free to determine chapter content, including whether to present theoretical or empirical work. They were, however, asked to include implications for learning and teaching, which are stated throughout their work or in separate sections. The book is not explicitly divided into sections but is grouped by topic. After an introductory chapter that provides a conceptual overview and briefly summarizes the contributions, three chapters examine help seeking from complementary theoretical perspectives and make important distinctions between forms of help seeking. Two chapters then focus on how learners' achievement and social goals affect classroom help seeking. In addition to discussions of culture in several chapters, one is specifically devoted to cross-cultural comparisons of help seeking in Western cultures with that in Japan. Two chapters then focus on the most frequent manifestation of help seeking, that of question asking. The final chapter explores the implications for help seeking of the dramatic changes in access to information and communications technology, and raises the issue of social versus artificial agency in the help-seeking process.