Abstracts - Earli

Help-seeking in the zone of available assistanceRose Luckin, University of London, United KingdomThe Zone of Available Assistance (ZAA) describes the variety of qualities and quantities ofassistance that need to be available to learners and teachers within an educational context. Butwhat factors influence the ways in which learners seek and select help from what is available? Weknow from the work of Wood and Wood (1999) that the accuracy of learners’ decisions about theirneed for help can be linked to their prior knowledge of the particular domain. This talk will drawupon subsequent work that offers evidence to support the importance of learner metacognition, thesocial context, learner goal orientation and to the help-seeking behaviour of learners.Embedding collaborative inquiry learning environments in differently structured classroomscripts: effects on help-seeking processes and learning outcomesKati Makitalo-Siegl, University of Munich, GermanyCarmen Kohnle, Kaufmannischen Schule Hechingen, GermanyFrank Fischer, University of Munich, GermanyCollaborative inquiry learning is seen as a student-centred approach which gives moreresponsibility to learners for regulating their learning processes. Recent research has repeatedlypointed to two problems for realizing collaborative inquiry learning in the classroom. On onehand, it has been demonstrated that students often refuse to seek help from their peer learners aswell as from their teacher when conducting typical inquiry like hypothesis formation or datainterpretation. On the other hand, it is yet unclear how phases of collaborative inquiry learningshould be embedded in the overall classroom setting. The aim of the study is to investigate whateffects a collaborative inquiry learning environment would have under conditions of a low vs. ahigh structured classroom script on learning outcomes and help-seeking processes. 32 studentsfrom a secondary school participated in this study. They worked in dyads on a physics module ofthe Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE). Both quantitative and qualitative analyseswere conducted. Although there were no significant differences between the students’ domainrelatedlearning outcomes in the high or the low structured script classroom conditions, we foundsignificant difference between the two conditions in seeking help from the teacher. Students withthe low structured classroom script sought help from the teacher more often than students with thehighly structured script. In addition, two case analyses show that more successful learners soughthelp from the teacher earlier and for different reasons (e.g. less technology-related questions) thanless successful learners. Results are discussed with respect to research on help seeking andcollaborative inquiry learning.– 282 –