This analysis reveals how big five personality traits and social support affect help-seeking behaviors in upper elementary students, suggesting avenues for improving academic achievement.
The purpose of this study was to explore how big five personality traits and social support would predict on-offline help-seeking behaviors as one of self-regulated learning strategies for upper elementary school students and how those variables would relate to students’ academic achievement. In particular, the study examined the differences in students’ help-seeking behaviors between offline and online situations, and also explored how personality as a personal characteristic and social support as an contextual characteristic would relate to students’ help-seeking behaviors. Ultimately, it examined the relations of help-seeking as a self-regulated learning strategy to academic achievement. To investigate those research questions, the data from 236 elementary school students in the fifth- and sixth-grades were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, correlation, paired sample t-test, and hierarchical regression. The results of the study are as follows. First, students showed more ‘instrumental help-seeking’ offline, whereas they showed more ‘executive help-seeking’ and ‘avoidance of help-seeking’ online. Second, among big five personality traits, ‘agreeableness’, ‘conscientiousness’, and ‘extraversion’ positively predicted ‘instrumental help-seeking’, and ’extraversion’ and ‘openness to experience’ positively predicted ‘perceived benefits of help-seeking.’ Also, ‘conscientiousness’ negatively predicted ‘executive help-seeking’, while ‘extraversion’ and ‘conscientiousness’ negatively predicted ‘avoidance of help-seeking.’ Third, of social supports, only ‘teacher support’ positively predicted ‘help-seeking behavior.’ Fourth, ‘academic achievement’ was positively predicted when students showed more ‘instrumental help-seeking’ offline but when they showed less ‘avoidance of help-seeking’ online. These results confirm the importance of help-seeking behaviors in learning and suggest that teachers should provide supportive learning environment for students while considering their personality traits in order to enhance adaptive learning behaviors such as instrumental help-seeking. In addition, they provide implications for the necessity to improve students’ adaptive online help-seeking behaviors.
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Park et al. (2019) studied this question.
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