Abstracts - Earli

math. Responses to survey measures of achievement goals and help seeking confirmed thattracking served as a salient relative ability cue that undermined help seeking by enhancing studentability-approach and ability-avoidance goals for math. The second aim was to extrapolate fromtheory and research on students’ achievement goals and help seeking to examine contextualinfluences on teacher help seeking. Interestingly, no published studies have examined teacher helpseeking. In Study 2, 271 Israeli teachers completed a new measure of Achievement Goals forTeaching Measure, measures of perceived school mastery and ability goal structure, and perceivedpeer support, and reported how often they had sought help for various problems with teaching.Results confirmed that perceived school emphases on the importance of teacher learning anddevelopment enhanced help seeking by enhancing mastery goals for teaching and perceivedemphases on teachers’ ability and achievement relative to others undermined self-reported rates ofhelp seeking by enhancing teacher ability-avoidance goals. Perceived peer support and cooperationalso predicted help seeking. Thus, schools that emphasize relative ability and interpersonalcompetition make for reluctant help seekers and schools that value learning and cooperation withpeers enhance help seeking among teachers, as among students. I shall conclude by discussingimplications for theory and research on student and teacher motivation and help seeking and foreducational policy.Modeling and tutoring help seeking with a cognitive tutorBruce McLaren, Competence Center for e-Learning, GermanyIdo Roll, Carnegie Mellon University, USAVincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University, USAKenneth Koedinger, Carnegie Mellon University, USAOur research tests the hypothesis that computer-based tutoring of students’ help-seeking skillshelps them learn to be better help seekers, which in turn helps them to learn targeted cognitiveskills more effectively. We have explored this hypothesis in the context of Cognitive Tutors, alearning technology that has been shown to improve students’ learning in a variety of domains. Wecreated a detailed model of help-seeking behavior, implemented by means of production rules, thatforms the basis for the Help Tutor, a Cognitive Tutor that provides guidance on students’ metacognitivebehavior. The Help Tutor serves as an adjunct to a regular Cognitive Tutor. Studentsworking with the Help Tutor receive tutoring both on domain-specific skills, in this case, geometryproblem solving, and help-seeking behavior. To test whether the Help Tutor is effective, weconducted an experiment involving 60 students and performed four analyses. First, we foundevidence that the Help Tutor’s meta-cognitive model adequately captures adaptive help-seekingbehavior and help-seeking errors. Second, we found that the help-seeking behavior of studentswho worked with the Help Tutor was better (i.e., conforms more closely to the model) than that ofstudents who did not work with the Help Tutor. Third, we found no statistically significantdifference between those students who used the Help Tutor and those who didn’t with respect tolearning of geometry problem-solving skills. Finally, we found no evidence that students’ helpseekingbehavior improved over time as a result of the Help Tutor’s guidance. Thus, while theexperiment provides evidence that the Help Tutor captures some aspects of help-seeking behavior,it did not confirm the hypothesis that students become better help seekers and better learners as aresult of the Help Tutor. In a new study, we will attempt to improve the meta-cognitive supportprovided by the Help Tutor.– 281 –