skip to main content
10.1145/3488042.3488052acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pageskoli-callingConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Patterns of Academic Help-Seeking in Undergraduate Computing Students

Published: 18 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Knowing when and how to seek academic help is crucial to the success of undergraduate computing students. While individual help-seeking resources have been studied, little is understood about the factors influencing students to use or avoid certain resources. Understanding students’ patterns of help-seeking can help identify factors contributing to utilization or avoidance of help resources by different groups, an important step toward improving the quality of resources. We present a mixed-methods study investigating the help-seeking behavior of undergraduate computing students. We collected survey data (n=138) about students’ frequency of using several resources followed by one-on-one student interviews (n=15) to better understand why they use those resources. Several notable patterns were found. Women sought help in office hours more frequently then men did and computing majors sought help from their peers more often than non-computing majors. Additionally, interview data revealed a common progression in which students started from easily accessible but low utility resources (online sources and peers) before moving on to less easily accessible, high utility resources (like instructor office hours).

References

[1]
Sylvia Beyer. 2014. Why are women underrepresented in Computer Science? Gender differences in stereotypes, self-efficacy, values, and interests and predictors of future CS course-taking and grades. Computer Science Education 24, 2-3 (2014), 153–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2014.963363
[2]
Jennifer M. Blaney and Jane G. Stout. 2017. Examining the Relationship Between Introductory Computing Course Experiences, Self-Efficacy, and Belonging Among First-Generation College Women. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education(Seattle, Washington, USA) (SIGCSE ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017751
[3]
Madeleine Bornschlegl, Kathryn Meldrum, and Nerina J. Caltabiano. 2020. Variables Related to Academic Help‐Seeking Behaviour in Higher Education – Findings from a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Review of Education 8, 2 (2020), 486–522. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3196
[4]
Yuk Fai Cheong, Frank Pajares, and Paul S. Oberman. 2004. Motivation and Academic Help-Seeking in High School Computer Science. Computer Science Education 14, 1 (Jan. 2004), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1076/csed.14.1.3.23501
[5]
J. McGrath Cohoon. 2001. Toward improving female retention in the computer science major. Commun. ACM 44, 5 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1145/374308.374367
[6]
J. McGrath Cohoon. 2002. Recruiting and retaining women in undergraduate computing majors. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 34, 2 (2002), 48–52. https://doi.org/10.1145/543812.543829
[7]
Darnell Cole and Araceli Espinoza. 2008. Examining the Academic Success of Latino Students in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Majors. Journal of College Student Development 49, 4 (2008), 285–300. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.0.0018
[8]
Jo Davies and Martin Graff. 2005. Performance in e-learning: online participation and student grades. British Journal of Educational Technology 36, 4 (2005), 657–663.
[9]
Pierpaolo Dondio and Suha Shaheen. 2019. Is StackOverflow an Effective Complement to Gaining Practical Knowledge Compared to Traditional Computer Science Learning?. In Proceedings of the 2019 11th International Conference on Education Technology and Computers (Amsterdam, Netherlands) (ICETC 2019). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 132–138. https://doi.org/10.1145/3369255.3369258
[10]
Kathy Garvin-Doxas and Lecia J. Barker. 2004. Communication in computer science classrooms: understanding defensive climates as a means of creating supportive behaviors. Journal on Educational Resources in Computing 4, 1 (March 2004), 2. https://doi.org/10.1145/1060071.1060073
[11]
Catherine Good, Aneeta Rattan, and Carol S. Dweck. 2012. Why do women opt out? Sense of belonging and women’s representation in mathematics.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102, 4(2012), 700–717. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026659
[12]
Carol Goodenow. 1993. The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: Scale development and educational correlates. Psychology in the Schools 30, 1 (1993), 79?90. https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6807(199301)30:1<79::AID-PITS2310300113>3.0.CO;2-X arXiv:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/1520-6807%28199301%2930%3A1%3C79%3A%3AAID-PITS2310300113%3E3.0.CO%3B2-X
[13]
Stuart A. Karabenick. 2004. Perceived Achievement Goal Structure and College Student Help Seeking.Journal of Educational Psychology 96, 3 (2004), 569–581. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.96.3.569
[14]
Stuart A. Karabenick and Myron H. Dembo. 2011. Understanding and facilitating self-regulated help seeking. New Directions for Teaching and Learning 2011, 126 (June 2011), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.442
[15]
Stuart A. Karabenick and John R. Knapp. 1988. Help seeking and the need for academic assistance.Journal of Educational Psychology 80, 3 (1988), 406–408. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.3.406
[16]
Stuart A. Karabenick and John R. Knapp. 1991. Relationship of academic help seeking to the use of learning strategies and other instrumental achievement behavior in college students.Journal of Educational Psychology 83, 2 (1991), 221–230. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.83.2.221
[17]
Kevin Lin, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and Brian Railing. 2021. How Can We Make Office Hours Better?Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1363. https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3439502
[18]
Carol A. Lundberg and Dennis Sheridan. 2015. Benefits of Engagement with Peers, Faculty, and Diversity for Online Learners. College Teaching 63, 1 (Jan. 2015), 8–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2014.972317
[19]
Moa Marklund and Sara Gustavsson. 2018. ’Why Am i even Doing This?’: The Experiences of Female Students in CS from an Insider Perspective. Proceedings - 2018 6th International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering, LaTiCE 2018 (2018), 77–81. https://doi.org/10.1109/LaTICE.2018.000-2
[20]
Heath Marrs, Ellen A. Sigler, and Robyn D. Brammer. 2012. Gender, Masculinity, Femininity and Help Seeking in College. Masculinities and Social Change 1, 3 (2012), 267–292. https://doi.org/10.4471/MCS.2012.16
[21]
Anna May, Johannes Wachs, and Anikó Hannák. 2019. Gender differences in participation and reward on Stack Overflow. Empirical Software Engineering 24, 4 (Aug. 2019), 1997–2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09685-x
[22]
Radu P. Mihail, Beth Rubin, and Judy Goldsmith. 2014. Online Discussions: Improving Education in CS?. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) (SIGCSE ’14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 409–414. https://doi.org/10.1145/2538862.2538898
[23]
Shweta Mishra. 2020. Social networks, social capital, social support and academic success in higher education: A systematic review with a special focus on ‘underrepresented’ students. Educational Research Review 29 (Feb. 2020), 100307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100307
[24]
S. Nelson-Le Gall. 1981. Help-Seeking: An understudied skill in children. Developmental Review 1, 3 (1981), 224–246.
[25]
An Nguyen and Colleen M. Lewis. 2020. Competitive Enrollment Policies in Computing Departments Negatively Predict First-Year Students’ Sense of Belonging, Self-Efficacy, and Perception of Department. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, Portland OR USA, 685–691. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366805
[26]
Tuan Dinh Nguyen, Marisa Cannata, and Jason Miller. 2018. Understanding student behavioral engagement: Importance of student interaction with peers and teachers. The Journal of Educational Research 111, 2 (March 2018), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2016.1220359
[27]
Jimmy Patel and Abi Aghayere. 2006. Students’ Perspective on the Impact of a Web-based Discussion Forum on Student Learning. In Proceedings. Frontiers in Education. 36th Annual Conference. 26–31. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2006.322600
[28]
Elizabeth Patitsas and Patrice Belleville. 2012. What Can We Learn from Quantitative Teaching Assistant Evaluations?. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) (WCCCE ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 36–40. https://doi.org/10.1145/2247569.2247582
[29]
Thomas W. Price, Zhongxiu Liu, Veronica Catete, and Tiffany Barnes. 2017. Factors influencing students’ help-seeking behavior while programming with human and computer tutors. ICER 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research(2017), 127–135. https://doi.org/10.1145/3105726.3106179
[30]
Yanyan Ren, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Kathi Fisler. 2019. What Help Do Students Seek in TA Office Hours?. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research. ACM, Toronto ON Canada, 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1145/3291279.3339418
[31]
Ana Selvaraj, Eda Zhang, Leo Porter, and Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj. 2021. Live Coding: A Review of the Literature. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (Virtual Event, Germany) (ITiCSE ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 164–170. https://doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456382
[32]
Kristin Stephens-Martinez and Brian Railling. 2019. How Can We Make Office Hours Better?. In Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Minneapolis, MN, USA) (SIGCSE ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1247. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3293741
[33]
Jacob Sukhodolsky. 2017. How to Eliminate Cheating from an Introductory Computer Programming Course. International Journal of Computer Science Education in Schools 1, 4 (Oct. 2017), 25–34. https://doi.org/10.21585/ijcses.v1i4.13
[34]
Adrian Thinnyun, Ryan Lenfant, Raymond Pettit, and John R. Hott. 2021. Gender and Engagement in CS Courses on Piazza. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, Virtual Event USA, 438–444. https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432395
[35]
Vincent Tinto. 2012. Completing college: Rethinking institutional action. University of Chicago Press.
[36]
Kelley A. Tompkins, Kierra Brecht, Brock Tucker, Lucia L. Neander, and Joshua K. Swift. 2016. Who matters most? The contribution of faculty, student-peers, and outside support in predicting graduate student satisfaction.Training and Education in Professional Psychology 10, 2 (May 2016), 102–108. https://doi.org/10.1037/tep0000115
[37]
Bogdan Vasilescu, Andrea Capiluppi, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2012. Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study of StackOverflow. In 2012 International Conference on Social Informatics. 332–338. https://doi.org/10.1109/SocialInformatics.2012.81
[38]
Mickey Vellukunnel, Philip Buffum, Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Jeffrey Forbes, Sarah Heckman, and Ketan Mayer-Patel. 2017. Deconstructing the Discussion Forum: Student Questions and Computer Science Learning. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, Seattle Washington USA, 603–608. https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017745
[39]
Elizabeth Wirtz, Amy Dunford, Edward Berger, Elizabeth Briody, Gireesh Guruprasad, and Ryan Senkpeil. 2018. Resource usage and usefulness: academic help-seeking behaviours of undergraduate engineering students. Australasian Journal of Engineering Education 23, 2 (2018), 62–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/22054952.2018.1525889
[40]
Sungjun Won, Lauren C. Hensley, and Christopher A. Wolters. 2021. Brief Research Report: Sense of Belonging and Academic Help-Seeking as Self-Regulated Learning. The Journal of Experimental Education 89, 1 (Jan. 2021), 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2019.1703095
[41]
Sungjun Won, Christopher A. Wolters, and Stefanie A. Mueller. 2018. Sense of Belonging and Self-Regulated Learning: Testing Achievement Goals as Mediators. The Journal of Experimental Education 86, 3 (July 2018), 402–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2016.1277337
[42]
John Wrenn and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2019. Executable Examples for Programming Problem Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (Toronto ON, Canada) (ICER ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 131–139. https://doi.org/10.1145/3291279.3339416

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)The Effects of Generative AI on Computing Students’ Help-Seeking PreferencesProceedings of the 26th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3636243.3636248(39-48)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
  • (2024)An Investigation of the Drivers of Novice Programmers' Intentions to Use Web Search and GenAIProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671112(487-501)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)The Trees in the Forest: Characterizing Computing Students' Individual Help-Seeking ApproachesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671099(343-358)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
Koli Calling '21: Proceedings of the 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
November 2021
287 pages
ISBN:9781450384889
DOI:10.1145/3488042
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 November 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. academic help-seeking
  2. office hours
  3. peers
  4. self-regulation

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

Koli Calling '21

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 182 submissions, 44%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)159
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)18
Reflects downloads up to 06 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)The Effects of Generative AI on Computing Students’ Help-Seeking PreferencesProceedings of the 26th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3636243.3636248(39-48)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
  • (2024)An Investigation of the Drivers of Novice Programmers' Intentions to Use Web Search and GenAIProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671112(487-501)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)The Trees in the Forest: Characterizing Computing Students' Individual Help-Seeking ApproachesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671099(343-358)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Debugging with an AI Tutor: Investigating Novice Help-seeking Behaviors and Perceived LearningProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671092(84-94)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)CodeAid: Evaluating a Classroom Deployment of an LLM-based Programming Assistant that Balances Student and Educator NeedsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642773(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)The Robots Are Here: Navigating the Generative AI Revolution in Computing EducationProceedings of the 2023 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3623762.3633499(108-159)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Measuring self‐regulated learning in a junior high school mathematics classroom: Combining aptitude and event measures in digital learning materialsJournal of Computer Assisted Learning10.1111/jcal.1284239:6(1834-1851)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2023

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media