Chapter 5: Help Seeking in Computer-Supported Collaborative Inquirylearning Environments

Applying collaborative inquiry learning to science education requires the joint involvement of learners in scientific activities such as generating questions and hypotheses, gathering evidence, interpreting scientific data, and developing as well as evaluating answers. These academically challenging tasks can be overwhelming even if they are not sufficiently supported, for example, by expert guidance and scaffolding as well as small group scripting (e.g., Kollar, Fischer, & Slotta, 2007; Linn, 2006; van Joolingen & Zacharia, 2009). However, it is largely an open question whether students who are facing academic difficulties appropriately use the help that is available from multiple classroom sources (e.g., teacher, peer learner, computer-supported learning environment; see Mäkitalo-Siegl & Fischer, 2011; see also Huet, Dupeyrat, & Escribe, this volume; Kitsantas, Dabbagh, & Dass, this volume). We do know that students often abstain from seeking help from their teacher and their peer learners when conducting typical inquiry tasks such as generating hypotheses or interpreting data (van Joolingen, de Jong, Lazonder, Savelsbergh, & Manlove, 2005). Not asking for help when facing academic difficulties is not the exception in collaborative inquiry-learning classrooms; earlier help-seeking research shows that this phenomenon is generally widespread across a variety of educational settings (Aleven & Koedinger, 2000; Aleven, Stahl, Schworm, Fischer, & Wallace, 2003; Newman, 2000; Ryan, Pintrich, & Midgley, 2001).