How Interpersonal Factors Matter for Help Seeking in the Classroom

I (Allison) first knew Stuart Karabenick in a mentoring role. I was a first-year graduate student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan. At the time, Stuart was a Professor in the Psychology Department at Eastern Michigan University. I was designing a study to meet my program's “early research requirement” (affectionately known as the 619). My advisor was Paul Pintrich who was known for his groundbreaking work on integrating motivation into frameworks of cognitive processing and learning strategies. I was focusing on student help seeking in the classroom. Help seeking was particularly interesting to me because it was both a learning strategy and a social interaction. Paul had suggested I invite Stuart to be on my committee given his work on help seeking. Stuart graciously agreed and provided insightful feedback on my ideas. With the help of Carol Midgley, I found a middle school that was interested in adolescent help seeking and I collected data that spring. Ultimately, this study turned into my first publication “Should I Ask for Help: The Role of Motivation and Attitudes in Adolescents' Help Seeking in Math Class” which came out in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1997.