Academic Help-seeking Preference of Students during Online Flexible Learning

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study on academic help-seeking (AHS) behavior of freshmen students taking up Discrete Structures. We found that student s perceive academic help-seeking as a beneficial and positive trait for them to see from other people’s perspective, learn more, and have the chance to interact. From the students’ ratings on the six attitudinal factors that motivate help -seeking behavior, x -means clustering with feature selection derived four significant features including perceived usefulness of classmates, trust on classmates , perception of instructors, and perception of the course. Students in one cluster recognized their peers as useful source of help but do not totally trust them which could be due to the fact that these freshmen students have not met their classmates face -to-face in person for the entire duration of the school year. In relation, the most preferred source of academic help are online resources such as Internet search results and video tutorials which could be explained by the Internet- driven flexible learning setup . However, the respondents are significantly more satisfied with the academic support that they have received from their instructor compared to other sources. This tells us that even in an online setup with vast resources on the Internet, the teachers play a significant role in encouraging students to seek help and in providing the academic support that the students need.