An integrative review of the relationship of academic and social goals with academic help-seeking: Is seeking help always the best strategy for a student’s learning?

Abstract

Academic help-seeking is a unique social and learning strategy for self-regulated learning. In this article, we focus on how students’ academic and social goals affect academic help-seeking in classrooms. A meta-analysis of academic achievement goals found that students’ academic mastery goal and classroom mastery goal structure have a positive effect on adaptive help-seeking, and a negative effect on the avoidance of help-seeking. In addition, a narrative review of research on social domain goals found that students’ social developmental goals have a positive effect on their adaptive help-seeking. However, social presentation goals affected students’ dependent help-seeking. The importance of mastery goals in the academic and social domains is discussed with respect to enhancing students’ adaptive help-seeking, which promotes academic success.