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Background. Academic help-seeking benefits students’ achievement, but existing literature either studies important factors in students’ selection of all help resources via self-reported surveys or studies their help-seeking behavior in one or two separate help resources via actual help-seeking records. Little is known about whether computing students’ approaches and behavior match, and not much is understood about how they transition sequentially from one help resource to another. Objectives. We aim to study post-secondary computing students’ academic help-seeking approach and behavior. Specifically, we seek to investigate students’ self-reported orders of resource usage and whether these approaches match with students’ actual utilization of help resources. We also examine frequent patterns emerging from students’ chronological help-seeking records in course-affiliated help resources. Context and Study Method. We surveyed students’ self-reported orders of resource usage across 12 offerings of seven courses at two institutions, then analyzed their responses using various help resource dimensions identified by existing works. From two of these courses (an introduction to programming course and a data science course, 11 offerings), we obtained students’ help-seeking records in all course-affiliated help resources, along with code autograder records. We then compared students’ reported orders in these two courses against their actions in the records. Finally, we mined sequences of student help-seeking events from these two courses to reveal frequent sequential patterns. Findings. Students’ reported orders of help resource usage form a progression of clusters where resources in each cluster are more similar to each other by help resource dimensions than to resources outside of their cluster. This progression partially confirms phenomena and decision factors reported by existing literature, but no factor/dimension alone can explain the entire progression. We found students’ actual help-seeking records did not deviate much from their self-reported orders. Mining of the sequential records revealed that help-seeking from course-affiliated human resources led to measurable progress more often than not, and students’ usage of consulting/office hours (mainly run by undergraduate teaching assistants) itself was the best indicator for future usage within the lifespan of the same assignment. Implications. Our results demonstrate that computing students’ help resource selection/utilization is a sophisticated process that should be modeled and analyzed with sufficient awareness of its inherent sequentiality. We identify future research directions through this preliminary analysis, which can lead to a better understanding of computing students’ help-seeking behavior and better resource utilization/management in large-scale instructional contexts.
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This content will become publicly available on August 12, 2025
The Trees in the Forest: Characterizing Computing Students' Individual Help-Seeking Approaches
Background and Context. Academic help-seeking is vital to post-secondary computing students’ effective learning. However, most empirical works in this domain study students’ help resource selection and utilization by aggregating the entire student body as a whole. Moreover, existing theoretical frameworks often implicitly assume that whether/how much a student seeks help from a specific resource only depends on context (the type of help needed and the properties of the resources), not the individual student. Objectives. To address the gap, we seek to investigate individual computing students’ help-seeking approaches by analyzing what help-seeking characteristics are individual-driven (and thus stay consistent for the same student across different course contexts) and what are context-driven. Method. We analyzed N = 597 students’ survey responses on their help resource utilization as well as their actual help-seeking records across 6 courses. We examined relations between individual students’ frequency-based help usage metrics, type-of-help requested in office/consulting hours, self-reported order of ideal help resource usage, and their collaboration inclination in small-scale sections. Findings. We found that students’ frequency-based help metrics and their order of ideal help resource usage stays relatively consistent across different course contexts, and thus may be treated as part of students’ individual help-seeking approaches. On the other hand, the type of help students seek in office/consulting hours and how much they collaborate with peers in small sections do not seem to stay consistent across different contexts and thus might be deemed more context-driven than individual-driven. Implications. Our findings reveal that part of students’ help-seeking characteristics is individual-driven. This opens up a possibility for institutions to track students’ help-seeking records in early/introductory courses, so that some preliminary understanding of students can be acquired before they enter downstream courses. Our insights may also help instructors identify which part of students’ help-seeking behavior are more likely to be influenced by their course context and design.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2336805
- PAR ID:
- 10583131
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400704758
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 343 to 358
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Melbourne VIC Australia
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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