Advances in Help-Seeking Research and Applications

The Role of Emerging Technologies

Edited by:
Stuart A. Karabenick, University of Michigan
Minna Puustinen, INS HEA

Published 2013

Research on help seeking has primarily focused on classrooms interactions that consist primarily of students asking teachers and peers for help. The rapid emergence of information and communications technologies and interactive learning environments, however, requires expanding the help-seeking landscape and rethinking such critical theoretical issues as the distinction between help seeking and information search, and whether help seeking is inevitably a social self-regulated learning strategy. There is also the need to focus attention on help seeking in the broader learning enterprise, which includes its role in the collaboration process, how to support adaptive rather than the over- or under-reliance on help seeking, as well as to scaffold help-seeking skills that render the process more efficient and useful.

To examine these and other issues, the present volume assembled contributions from internationally recognized scholars and researchers to capture the state of the art and to anticipate future developments in this expanding field. Its relevance extends to anyone attempting to understand the role of technology in education, including educational researchers and teachers who do now or who expect to use technology to support instruction, and the rapidly expanding numbers of those developing new technological applications.

CONTENTS
Foreword. 1. Introduction, Stuart A. Karabenick and Minna Puustinen. 2. Is It So Hard to Seek Help and So Easy to Use Google? André Tricot and Nicole Boubée. 3. Characterizing Sources of Academic Help in the Age of Expanding Educational Technology: A New Conceptual Framework, Kara Makara and Stuart A. Karabenick. 4. Using Learning Technologies to Support Help-Seeking in Higher Education Contexts, Anastasia Kitsantas, Nada Dabbagh, and Susan Dass. 5. Help Seeking in Computer-Supported Collaborative Inquiry-Learning Environments, Kati Mäkitalo-Siegland Frank Fischer. 6. Help-Seeking Intentions and Actual Help-Seeking Behavior in Interactive Learning Environments, Nathalie Huet, Caroline Dupeyrat, and Christian Escribe. 7. Analyzing Natural Data to Understanding How Students Seek and Obtain Homework Help Online, Minna Puustinen and Josie Bernicot. 8. Elements of Social Computing in Online Help Design: Fostering Help-Seeking Activities in Communities of Practice, Silke Schworm and Nicolae Nistor. 9. Learning with the Ecolab: Co-Constructing a Zone of Proximal Adjustment to Scaffold Help-Seeking Behaviour in a Simulated Science Microworld, Rose Luckin. 10. An Innovative Experimental Design for Addressing the “Assistance Dilemma” Using Interactive Learning Environments, Inbal Nahum-Shani, Xi Lu, Melanie M. Henderson, and Susan A. Murphy. 11. Conclusions and Future Directions, Minna Puustinen and Stuart A. Karabenick.