Students’ Help-Seeking Patterns in Subgoal Learning Environments for Programming

Abstract

Subgoal learning facilitates knowledge transfer by structuring learning around meaningful goals. While such environments offer feedback to guide learners, how students seek help using these tools—and how such behaviors impact learning— remains underexplored. This study investigates help-seeking patterns in a block-based programming ITS with multi-level feedback. We analyzed log data from 42 engineering students using KMeans clustering and identified 6 distinct profiles.