Students Help-Seeking during Physical Education - Essay Example

Students' Help-Seeking during Physical Education This paper will focus on analyzing the research done by Susan Nye entitled “Students' Help-Seeking during Physical Education”. In Nye’s research, she used an interpretative qualitative research design which employed a case study approach in order to investigate the help-seeking tendencies of middle school students during their physical education classes. In her study, there were ten student participants, six of whom are females and the remaining four are males, and all were selected from two middle schools in a Midwestern urban school district. The latter had 26 middle schools all in all.   Help-Seeking Behavior of Students  According to Nye’s paper, learning is perpetuated by various environmental factors or more specifically, by a student’s academic surrounding. Having said that, there were instances when students face academic complexities. There is a tendency for them to give up prematurely, act passively, or exert effort but still be unsuccessful. However, in the face of such difficulties, they will also tend to seek help from fellow students or teachers, and at some point look for other means in order to conquer these difficulties. It is said that there is a positive link between the utilization of self-regulated strategies and a student’s academic performance. This claim was also supported by Alleven & Koedinger (2000) when they asserted that the ability to seek help capably has been proven to contribute to one’s learning and was correctly linked with better learning coupled with working. However, it should be noted that the help-seeking behavior showed by the students is more often flawed than not. It is because of the fact that they tend to overuse it as much as underuse it. The thing is, the students frequently tend to avoid help when it is most necessary, while ironically they ask for more than is actually required when they decide to ask for help (Alleven & Koedinger, 2000).  Help-Seeking among College Students and College Students in Large Classes   Compared to the studies of help-seeking in adolescents and younger students, such as the work of Nye, there have been relatively fewer studies of such which focused on college students. In line with that, there are questions about whether these studies regarding younger learners extend to higher education settings. Therefore, for this part of the paper, the author aims to look at the dynamics of help-seeking in college students rather than to focus on younger learners such as the approach made by Nye.  In a study conducted by Karabenick & Knapp (1991) , they aimed to investigate the help-seeking attitudes, goals and the preferred helping resources of college students in order to recognize the dynamics of help-seeking among college students in large classes. In his study, there were 883 college student participants. It was suggested that these students tend to be loosely described by two help-seeking orientations. Adaptive orientation refers to the extent to which students sought instrumental help from teachers rather than fellow students. Avoidant orientation refers to the degree to which the students feel threatened and avoid looking for help that if attained would lessen their workload (Karabenick & Knapp, 1991).  It is important to understand the concept in the context of large classes since it remains as one of the main venues for college instruction. More often than not, there are hundreds of students which may be quite impersonal for those who have been accustomed to the family-like conditions in grade school and high school. Even if anonymity can be an advantage of such class size to smoothen help seeking, it can also act as barrier to students in need of assistance. It was concluded by some studies such as that by Karabenick & Knapp (1998) that during a regular semester, college students at a certain point will need help but those who need it the most are surprisingly the least likely to seek it. It was concluded by Arbreton (1993) that there are two help-seeking orientations among students in these kinds of classes which is also consistent to that of Karabenick & Knapp. In summary, the higher the adaptive help-seeking orientation of a student, the more that they tend to seek instrumental help from formal sources such as professors rather than informal sources (e.g. other students). In addition, these students were also said to be more motivated, have more mastery, are more goal oriented, more likely to utilize cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies, and lastly are more likely to perform better in their course. On the other hand, those students who belong to the avoidant help-seeking orientation category experience threat in help seeking. Moreover, they avoid doing so, and seek such help in order to avoid work. Communication and Help Seeking Although the author complimented Nye for coming up with a an extensive and in-depth research regarding help-seeking, he did not point out an important factor in help seeking that Nye failed to point out. Thus, for this part of the paper, the author will analyze the role played by communication in students’ help-seeking. After much debate and researche, it was arrived at that communication labs may help students overcome their communication anxieties in connection to speaking to their instructors. Based on the study of Whitfield & Nelson (2008) students who do not feel that they are skilled communicators may not ask questions or otherwise talk to the teacher about significant matters related to the course. In order to address such, there was a growing awareness in colleges to develop basic public speaking courses to include speech laboratories. Although there is substantial help that these public speaking facilities offer, they are still rarely used by students. According to Knapp and Karabenick (1988) this is because students would rather seek help from informal sources such as peers. Inside the classroom, it is vital for teachers and professors to cultivate supportive environments wherein students can feel adequate comfort that will motivate them to seek help and ask questions. The perceptions of students of their instructors play an important role in the probability that a student will seek help. It was also found that in some instances, students who identify their teachers as effective have less questions to ask but are more likely to ask questions if the need arises (Whitfield & Nelson, 2008). Conversely, students who see their professor as ineffective are more likely confused which may lead to more unasked and unanswered questions left unexpressed. The only way to eliminate such unasked questions directed to instructors, is the provision of opportunities. Teachers ought to support a friendly environment for discussion, to make students motivated to ask (Taplin, Jegede & etc 2001). Aside from the supportiveness of the professor, there are also other factors which are vital to the topic. According to studies earlier done, there are two forms of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic, which influence the students’ choice of approaching and reasoning out with their instructors. Instructors who construct classroom environments that offer optimal challenges,  maintains self-sufficiency and provide feedback promote intrinsic motivation. On the other hand, environments which are coined as unfairly easy or overly difficult for students encourage dependence and discourage investigative learning (Taplin et al, 2001).  References Aleven, V., & Koedinger, K. (2000). Investigations into help seeking and learning with a cognitive tutor. Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Arbreton, A. (1993). When getting help is helpful: Developmental, cognitive, and motivational influences on student’s academic help seeking. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Alexitch, L.R. (2002). The role of help seeking attitudes and tendencies in students’ references for academic advising. Journal of College Student Development, 43(1), 5-19. Karabenick, S.A. (2001). Seeking help in large college classes: Who, why, and from whom? Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, WA. Karabenick, S.A., & Knapp, J.R. (1991). Relationship of academic help seeking to these of learning strategies and other instrumeal achievement behavior in college students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(2), 221-230. Knapp, J. R., & Karabenick, S. A. (1988). Incidence of formal and informal academic help seeking in higher education. Journal of College Student Development, 29(3), 223-227 Taplin, M., Yum, J., Jegede, O., Fan, R., & Chan, M. (2001). Help seeking strategies used by high-achieving and low achieving distance education students. Journal of Distance Education, 16(1), 1-11. Whitfield, T. S. and Nelson, C. L. (2008). Help me? Communication resource center usage, help-seeking behaviors, and student motives for communicating with instructors. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Online . 2009-02-03 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p231714_index.html Read More