Strategic Help Seeking: Implications for Learning and Teaching

Research on strategic help seeking has gained considerable maturity and is actively pursued by researchers throughout the world. This edited volume is the first since 1983 to capture the current state of knowledge in this area, its implications for learning and teaching, and directions for future research. It begins with an introductory chapter that provides a conceptual overview and briefly summarizes the contributions, followed by three chapters which 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 of Japan. The next two chapters examine 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 communication technology for library reference personnel, as well as teachers.