Search

Two experiments investigated the role of children's assessments of their performance on their decisions to seek help and their preferences for different types of assistance. Blocked into low and high verbal skill groups, participants in study 1 were 84 middle-class third- and fifth-grade elementary school students. Subjects performed a multi-trial verbal task in which they were required to indicate their confidence in the correctness of their tentative solution and subsequently were given the opportunity to seek help before providing a final solution on each trial. The second experiment involved 39 subjects and differed from the first in that subjects were provided with a common motivation for seeking help. Findings indicated that subjects' confidence in the correctness of their solution influenced both the frequency and type of help sought. High task-related skill was associated with the discriminating use of help-seeking as an achievement strategy, especially among boys. Both the frequency and type of help sought varied with self-assessments for older children, and varied more than was the case among younger children. Findings are discussed in terms of grade and sex differences in the use of internally based cues for performance evaluation. The importance of accounting for the interplay of children's age and task-specific skill with achievement-related goals is stressed. (RH)

The study examined relationships between children's mastery motivation, self-assessment of performance, and task-related help-seeking behavior during task performance. A total of 79 average-achieving black elementary school students in the third- and fifth-grades, who varied in mastery motivation, performed a multi-trial verbal task and were given the opportunity to seek help on each trial after making a tentative response and assessing their performance by rating their confidence in the correctness of the response. A response-contingent payoff system was implemented to encourage children to restrict their help-seeking to those instances in which they perceived that they could not make a correct response without assistance. As predicted, children's self-assessments of performance, regardless of their accuracy, appeared to influence help-seeking more than the actual performance outcomes. Neither children's self-assessments of performance nor their overall rate of help-seeking varied with level of measured mastery motivation. However, the type of help sought did vary as expected with mastery motivation. Differences in motivational orientation influenced requests for help only when children perceived their initial solutions to be incorrect. These findings are discussed in the context of the analyses of help-seeking as an instrumental learning and achievement strategy. Implications for analyses of black children's achievement styles are highlighted. (RH)