Education Commons^™

Factors Influencing The Selection Of Academic Help Sources, Joan Giblin

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

This study extends the literature on academic help-seeking by identifying factors influencing undergraduate students’ selection of a source of help. Learners engage in intentional decisions to seek help from human and non-human sources to resolve gaps in knowledge. Decision making heuristics provide a theoretical lens to understand these intentional decisions. Previous research in academic help-seeking assumed learners sought only human sources of assistance, resulting in a narrow understanding of how learners resolve knowledge gaps. Methodological trends in help-seeking research consistently favor quantitative, survey based tools with pre-defined options. As a result, the factors that influence the selection of a source …