Help-seeking: An understudied problem-solving skill in children

DEVELOPMENTAL

REVIEW

Help-Seeking:

1,

224-246 (1981)

An Understudied Problem-Solving Skill in Children SHARONNELSON-LEGALL University

of Pittsburgh

Traditional approaches to the study of young children’s behavior in helping relationships are examined and criticized as inadequate because they have failed to represent the child’s perspective from the role of “active helpee” (i.e., helpseeker in such relationships). By failing to look at helping from the perspective of the one who seeks help, researchers have neglected to pursue an important lead in understanding why some children are able to learn and progress independently when confronted with the same obstacles that serve to defeat other children. This article focuses on instrumental help-seeking defined as an active, complex socialcognitive activity that is essential to learning and achievement. In the fast sections of this article, it is argued that instrumental help-seeking can be formally distinguished from passive dependency as well as from the actual giving and receiving of help. In following sections, a heuristic model of the help-seeking process is offered, prior research relevant to the model is reviewed, and ideas for research on help-seeking in children are suggested within the framework of this model.

During the childhood years there are many developing skills that contribute to the growth of social and cognitive competence. Among the most important of these skills is the facility with which a child is able to obtain help from adults and peers when it is needed. Children’s appropriate and effective use of others in their environment to amplify and enhance their own learning and goal attainment has received little attention from researchers. The purpose of this paper is to explicate a model of helpseeking activity that can be applied to understanding how instrumental help-seeking, as a social-cognitive activity, mediates achievement and personal- social adjustment in childhood. An extensive literature has developed that identifies the active role that children play in the social networks to which they belong (e.g., Bell, 1968; Bell & Harper, 1977; Harper, 1971; Lewis & Rosenblum, 1974, 1979; Osofsky & O’Connell, 1972; Rheingold, 1969, 1973). Recently, Lewis and The preparation of this manuscript was supported by the Learning Research and Development Center, supported in part as a research and development center by funds from the National Institute of Education (NIE), United States Department of Education. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect position or policy of NIE and no official endorsement should be inferred. The author wishes to express gratitude to Ruth Gumerman for her thoughtful comments and valuable criticisms of earlier drafts of this manuscript. Requests for reprints should be sent to Sharon Nelson-Le Gall, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. 224 0273-2297/81/030224-23$02.00/O Copyright @ 1981 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Feiring (1979) have proposed the concept of a matrix between the people (social objects) and activities of those people (social functions) in the child’s world. One of the more important of these social functions involves an activity relevant to instrumental help-seeking, i.e., the activity of finding out about the environment either through watching others, asking for information, or engaging in information acquisition with others. While providing an extremely important impetus to redirecting research efforts in socialization and early social relations, this literature has focused largely on the period of infancy and the years preceding the child’s entry to school, and has not given explicit attention to instrumental helpseeking as it occurs in the years after school entry. It appears, then, that the serious gap noted by Maccoby and Masters (1970) in our knowledge about instrumental help-seeking in school age children has not received much attention from researchers. Although we have learned a great deal in the past decade about the variables that determine if and when people will help those in need (Mussen & Eisenberg-Berg, 1977; Staub, 1978), very little is known about helping from the perspective of the helpee (Gergen, 1974). Recently, in the literature on adult helping behavior there has been some concern with the helpee, but the focus is largely on the helpee as a passive recipient of aid and with recipient reactions to aid (cf. Fisher, DePaulo, & Nadler, in press), rather than on the helpee as an active seeker of aid (Shapiro, 1978). Educational and developmental researchers, however, have yet to direct serious and vigorous efforts toward understanding the help-seeking process in children and how the child functions in the role of active helpee in helping interactions. The lack of focus on help-seeking in the literature on children’s helping behavior may have occurred because researchers have tended to focus on the predominant issues identified in the adult literature. As Bryan (1975) points out most of the initial studies on helping were addressed to the behavior of adults, not children. Considering the practical value of helpgiving for society and the fact that adults are likely to find themselves equally often (if not more often) in the position of the helper than of the helpee, it is not surprising that help-giving has been the focus of the adult literature. However, since children-especially young children-more often occupy the position of helpee, our adult perspective on the helping relationship may have prevented us from pursuing an equally germane line of research: the acquisition of aid by the helpee. HELP-SEEKING,

DEPENDENCE,

AND INDEPENDENCE

The child’s tendency to seek help has been studied by researchers interested in socialization and early social relations. Researchers have differed in whether help-seeking and question-asking should be included as

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part of the cluster of behaviors to be considered “dependent” (Maccoby & Masters, 1970). Researchers have shown agreement, however, in their tendency to include help-seeking as an aspect of dependence only in those instances in which the child did not appear to need the help per se, but was using the bids for help as a means of getting or keeping contact with an adult. Thus, for the most part, research and theoretical writing have dealt with “emotional” dependence (Maccoby & Masters, 1970). A potential misconception in thinking about help-seeking in children would be to view it as synonomous with dependence, and as such, to see it as set in opposition to independence on a single continuum (Beller, 1955; Heathers, 1955). Such a view assumes that dependence and independence are unidimensional constructs with high intrapersonal or cross-situational consistency that can be measured validly and reliably. According to this view, if dependence and independence were bipolar opposites, one could expect a very high negative correlation between measurements of dependence and independence when a number of children are tested and compared on these characteristics. Yet, tests of this hypothesis indicate low to moderate negative correlations between dependence and independence (Beller, 1955, 1957). In fact, the average correlation between help-seeking and achievement striving in Beller’s (1957) study was very low (-. 17). Maccoby and Master’s (1970) review of the literature indicated that there is very little cross-situational consistency in either dependence or independence, and therefore, no correlation should be expected between the two. Maccoby and Masters (1970) concluded from their review that “dependency” was too global a concept to be useful in analyzing the behavior of children beyond the first few years of life. In addition to the problems discussed above, help-seeking activity will not be referred to as dependency because there are negative connotations to the term “dependency,” such as passivity, helplessness, and even incompetence, that do not accurately reflect the complexity of helpseeking behavior. That help-seeking activity requires a fair amount of sophistication is apparent when one considers that in order to initiate help-seeking children must first learn to associate others with the achievement of their goals and must learn various means of inducing others to help attain these goals. Children who ask for help may be considered dependent because they are not solving a problem by themselves. However, seeking out a competent person for aid or advice may be an independent method of solving a difficult problem. A child who seeks help is showing initiative. Teachers of elementary school children tend to believe that children who seek help are more goal oriented and more involved in the learning process than children who give up easily, or wait for others to offer them help (Nelson & Scott-Jones, Note 1). Help-seeking may represent many different underlying motives de-

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pending on the child and the task situation. The child’s goal in seeking help may be merely to complete a task without comprehension or mastery as an objective, or to avoid criticism from an agent of evaluation, or to avoid the task altogether. Help-seeking may, however, serve a far more constructive purpose, such as enhancing the child’s own competence. It may be useful at this point to distinguish between “executive” helpseeking behavior and “instrumental” help-seeking behavior. Executive help-seeking would refer to those instances in which the child’s intention is to have someone else solve a problem or attain a goal on his or her behalf. Such bids for assistance may include those in which the help sought is not needed for the child to solve the problem. This type of help-seeking may have negative long-term effects, of course. Instrumental help-seeking would refer to those instances in which the help requested is limited to only the amount and type that is needed to allow the child to solve the problem or attain the goal in question for himself or herself. Distinctions of this sort have been referred to in previous discussions of help-seeking and dependency (Maccoby & Masters, 1970; Gordon, Note 2). Murphy (1962) suggested that help-seeking can be seen as autonomous behavior, in that the seeking of help may be part of a sequence of behavior initiated by the child and under his control. In the seeking of help the child maintains task orientation, as, for example, when a child remarks, “I want to put the big one in; you put the little one in” or asks “Will you hold the jar while I stir?” In these instances, help-seeking is a response in which the child dominates or controls others. Children with effective help-seeking skills are able to refuse help insofar as they can manage a task all by themselves, yet, can obtain help when it is needed. From this perspective, help-seeking represents competent, coping behavior. In fact, some psychologists have posited that developing the ability to ask appropriately for assistance is an important step toward achieving independent competence (Hartup, 1963; Rheingold, 1973; White & Watts, 1973). Therefore, the conceptualization proposed in this paper will focus on help-seeking not as the equivalent of dependency, but rather as a class of instrumental social-cognitive responses that function to assist the child’s goal attainment and adaptation to the environment. HELP-SEEKING

AS A POSITIVE,

INSTRUMENTAL

SKILL

Help-seeking comprises the attempts on the part of children to obtain assistance or intervention from another person when they cannot gratify their needs or attain a desired goal through their own efforts. Obtaining needed help is an integral component of the daily life patterns for normal, healthy children, and help-seeking activity could occur in many problemsolving contexts-informal as well as formal ones. Luria (1928) long ago suggested that psychologists and educators study the child’s use of exter-

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nal, socially and culturally provided means to aid and supplement learning. The study of everyday problem-solving activity points to the need to include elements dealing with help-seeking in theories of problem-solving behavior (Levin & Kareev, 1980). The conceptualization of social helpseeking as an instrumental skill is compatible with current views of cognitive development and learning based upon Vygotsky’s theory of internalization (Brown, in press; Brown & French, 1979; Wertsch, 1979). For Vygotsky (1978), learning and development are inherently social processes that involve gradual progression from other-regulation to selfregulation. Vygotsky argues that all psychological processes are initially social, embedded in interpersonal activity, and that the fundamental process of development is the gradual internalization and personalization of what was at first a social activity. Children first experience problemsolving activities in the presence of others, either in the context of adult-child interaction or peer collaboration, and only gradually do children come to perform these functions for themselves. This theoretical framework clearly places the origins of independent problem-solving at the intrapsychological level, in social interaction at the level of interpsychological functioning (Wertsch, 1979). Especially for children, the use of others as resources may be seen as an important problem-solving strategy related to general cognitive functioning as well as to the development of academic and social competence (Cooper, Ayers-Lopez, & Marquis, 1981; Enright & Sutterfield, 1980; O’Malley, 1977; Webb, 1980; White, 1975; White & Watts, 1973; Wright, 1980). Help-seeking may be fundamental in the development of mature give-and-take social relations with others. Positive correlations between help-seeking and peer acceptance have been found in young children. McCandless, Bilous, and Bennett (1961) found that whereas young children’s popularity with peers was inversely related to their emotional dependence on adults, help-seeking bore no relationship to their popularity within the peer group. Moore and Updegraff (1964) found that instrumental dependence (help-seeking) directed toward adults does not detract from a child’s popularity with peers; and that furthermore, when directed toward peers, help-seeking may facilitate a child’s social acceptance by peers. Help-seeking has also been found to be positively related to nurturance-giving and role-taking in children. Hartup and Keller (1960) found that seeking help was positively associated with nurturant behavior in nursery school children and suggested that both help-seeking and nurturance represent active, direct social responses. Wilson and Shantz (1977) found that help-seeking and role-taking performance were highly correlated in the early childhood years and that the strength of this relationship was greater for older than for younger children in their sample. Wilson and Shantz speculate that help-seeking places the burden on the

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child to take the viewpoint of the prospective helper in order to manipulate him or her. For example, children who seek help might find it increasingly difficult over time to obtain help without becoming more sensitive to the feelings and thoughts of potential helpers in their environment. Help-seeking plays an important role in cognitive and academic tasks as well. Kreutzer, Leonard, and Flavell (1975) have noted that children in kindergarten through fifth grade use other people as resources in memory tasks to store and retrieve information. Myers and Paris (1978) also found help-seeking used by children as a problem-solving strategy. They found that sixth graders were more likely than second graders to report seeking help as a strategy for dealing with difficulties encountered during reading tasks. As Kreutzer et al. (1975, p. 51) points out, the use of other people as resources “. . . trades on a well learned set of social help-seeking routines.” A legitimate and worthwhile task for developmental research is to begin the description and subsequently the analysis of these routines. The classroom context is a natural one in which to study help-seeking. In classrooms, help-seeking episodes are found to be embedded in the flow of informal peer interaction as well as in formal student-to-teacher bids for assistance. Cooper et al. (1981) studying kindergarten and second-grade children’s discourse, found episodes of peer instruction frequently interspersed throughout the children’s conversations. The clear majority of these peer instructional episodes were determined to be learner initiated (e.g., “I’m on problem number 5, could you help me on it?” “ What am I supposed to do next?“). This finding calls into question attempts on the part of educators to make a rigid distinction between “work” and “just talking.” Children are viewed by their peers as having information that is of central import in classroom learning (Cooper et al., 1981; Schofield, 1980; Nelson & Gumerman, Note 3). In fact, children may even prefer to consult peers rather than teachers, because peers may be more accessible and do not play a formal evaluative role in the classroom. The above discussion suggests that although instrumental help-seeking has been relatively neglected as a focus for research, it can be viewed in a positive manner as a pervasive and important aspect of learning and development, especially in the daily lives of children. Who seeks help, what type of help is solicited, and at what point in the problem-solving process help is sought, can be seen as important questions for theories of problem-solving. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that help-seeking behavior-which we view as a set of active, complex responses-is to some extent developmentally determined, inasmuch as there appears to be an increase with age in its effective use. In the following section a model of social help-seeking is presented. Relevant literature is discussed in the context of the model.

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A MODEL OF SOCIAL

GALL

HELP-SEEKING

In order to provide a characterization of what might be involved in seeking instrumental help from others, a model of the instrumental helpseeking process is presented schematically in Fig. 1 and discussed below. For the sake of clarity in presentation, the model focuses on the activity of help-seeking and does not represent in its present form other roles or activities salient to helping interactions, i.e., help-giving and help-using. It should be emphasized that this model is not intended to constitute a formal theory of help-seeking; rather, the model should be viewed as a heuristic aid to the development of research that provides a descriptive analysis of an important but relatively unexplored area of psychological study. The model, based on a “task analysis” of the help-seeking process, identifies both cognitive and behavioral activities in which the help-seeker may be thought to engage in prior to, during, and after seeking help. The model consists of five main component processes and can be briefly summarized as follows: (1) In any given task situation, the individual must first become aware of needing help (i.e., realize that his or her own available resources are not sufficient to reach a goal). (2) Being aware of the need for help, the individual can decide to seek help actively from others. (3) The individual must identify the person(s) (i.e., potential helpers) who can provide needed resources. (4) The individual seeking help must implement strategies for engaging another person’s help. (5) Finally, the individual makes some assessment of or evaluative response to the help-seeking episode. That is, help-seekers evaluate the success or failure of the help-seeking attempt, including the helpfulness or nonhelpfulness of the persons approached, the adequacy or inadequacy of the help obtained, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their own help-seeking activity. These judgments may influence future help-seeking behavior.

~~~t~t~t~ I----II L--------------J FIG. 1. Model of the help-seeking

process.

I II I

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Each component of the model will be discussed in more detail below. Inasmuch as the present model brings together several lines of investigation, a brief review of the relevant research in those areas will also be presented. This review should serve to clarify the bases for the questions that can be asked within the framework of the model. References will be cited mainly to illustrate generalizations made; hence, the literature review pertinent to each component will be selective rather than exhaustive. Awarenrss

of Need for Help

Baker and Brown (in press) pointed out that in a problem-solving situation, individuals’ knowledge about their resources (cognitive and noncognitive) and about the compatibility between themselves as learners and the learning situation play an important role. If children are aware of what is needed to perform effectively, then it is possible for them to take steps to meet the demands of the problem-solving situation. If, however, children are not aware of their own limitations or the complexity of the task at hand, then they can hardly be expected to anticipate difficulties and take preventive action or to recover easily from difficulties encountered. Thus, when a problem is encountered vis-a-vis attainment of some goal, if children have some awareness of their own resources and are monitoring progress in the task setting well enough to detect a problem, they are in a relatively good position to obtain help needed for the solution of the problem. The ability to appreciate how various factors affect a task’s difficulty is an important developmental accomplishment (Nicholls, 1978). A child’s ability to estimate a task’s difficulty may aid in the formatin of realistic expectations for performance. Similarly, understanding how different factors contribute to a task’s relative difficulty may assist the child’s adoption of appropriate strategies to accomplish the task. It appears that children as young as 4 years of age may demonstrate knowledge of factors that may render a task relatively easy or difficult to perform, especially when the factors affecting task complexity are presented in the context of activities that are familiar to young children (Futterman & Karabenick, Note 4). The developmental literature on metacognition suggests that the ability to assess one’s need for help is a skill influenced by both maturation and experience. Kreutzer et al. (1975) reported that children as young as kindergarten level are sometimes aware of the insufficiency of their own mental resources for the demands of memory tasks and in these cases turn to other people for mnemonic help. Markman (1977) investigated the ability of first- through third-grade children to analyze oral messages for completeness and consistency. Markman’s experiments suggest that

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there may be developmental changes in the monitoring of understanding and, furthermore, that the nature of the task is influential in determining the effectiveness of comprehension monitoring. Markman further reported that it was often not until the first graders actually tried to carry out the instructions that they realized they did not understand them. She hypothesized that when task demands are simple, slightly older children (i.e., third graders) can monitor their comprehension by executing instructions mentally and by attempting to infer the relationship between the instructions and the goal. Younger children, however, may fail to execute the appropriate mental processing, and thus only through active attempts to solve a problem or attain a goal do they become aware of their lack of understanding. The finding that comprehension monitoring is improved when children have some idea of what to expect and also when the criteria for evaluation of understanding are more explicit (Markman, 1977, 1979) suggests that monitoring of understanding is not an ability that simply develops with age, but rather is highly dependent on one’s knowledge state and experience (Brown & DeLoache, 1978; Chi, 1978). Young children may not always be aware that they have failed to understand, or at least they sometimes fail to express verbally their awareness of their failure to understand. Indeed, they often indicate verbally that they have understood when they have not, or give the impression that they have understood ambiguous or incomplete information by not asking for clarification or additional information (Asher, 1979; Cosgrove & Patterson, 1977, 1978; Ironsmith & Whitehurst, 1978). In spite of their apparent lack of awareness of their failure to understand, however, children may express their lack of comprehension nonverbally (Allen & Atkinson, 1978; Flavell, Speer, Green, & August, cited in Baker & Brown, in press; Patterson, Cosgrove, & O’Brien, 1980), and others may interpret these nonverbal cues as bids for help. More empirical work is needed to distinguish among the possible sources of young children’s failure to monitor their awareness of understanding (see Baker & Brown, in press; Markman, 1979, for more detailed discussions of metacomprehension development). Decision

to Seek Help

It might be assumed that awareness of the incompleteness of one’s knowledge would be sufficiently motivating to cause a person to seek help (e.g., Markman, 1979; Nash & Torrance, 1974; Torrance, 1970). Data on help-seeking in adults, however, suggest that there are costs associated with asking for and accepting help, which may restrict the group of potential helpers or deter the help-seeker altogether from attempting to obtain assistance (Greenberg & Shapiro, 1971; DePaulo & Fisher, 1980). DePaulo and Fisher (1980) suggest that a person deciding whether to ask for

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help may face a conflict. On the one hand, help is often useful or even indispensable to successful goal attainment; on the other hand, the helpseeker may be given less credit for a successful outcome on a task if help had been solicited to achieve it, or the help-seeker may suffer a loss of perceived competence in his or her own eyes and in the eyes of the helper and significant others. Thus, the decision to seek help may be affected not only by the need for help, but also by his or her judgment of the relative benefits and costs associated with seeking help. While analyses of costs and benefits may be of concern to adults, it is doubtful that they have the same importance to children. It could be speculated that children’s inferences about the relationship between seeking help and receiving help might affect their dispositions toward help-seeking. Do children make a distinction between receiving help and seeking help? That is, if help is received does it necessarily imply to children that help was sought, and vice versa? If, for example, young children fail to distinguish between receiving and seeking help, they may interpret an adult’s tendency to respond to the minimal cues they provide or an adult’s tendency to make anticipatory responses to their needs as evidence that they are seeking help and doing all that is necessary to obtain it. It is not uncommon, especially in the case of infants and very young children, for help to be offered even before the child being helped realizes that he or she needs it. In this case, the child might not decide to seek help actively because help is seen as always forthcoming. On the other hand, an older child who equates help received with help sought may not only refrain from seeking help but may also reject offered help because, on the basis of the cost factor described above, receiving help would imply that help was sought for the purpose of overcoming some personal inadequacy. Not wishing to appear helpless before his or her peers, the child may decide not to seek help. It is quite conceivable that children who seek help may sometimes be teased or subjected to scornful remarks by peers. At what point in their development children become sensitive to these costs is a question for research. Brown (1976) has reported that children at a “preoperational” level of cognitive functioning have a preference for attending to the outcomes of actions in their verbal and nonverbal reconstructions of series of events. Piaget (1932, 1976)also suggests that young children may be more concerned with the outcome than with the means (process) of achieving the outcome. Thus, it may be that some of the psychological costs of asking for help that affect adults’ help-seeking (e.g., loss of perceived competence) would not influence young children’s decisions to seek help, since children would be more concerned with the successful outcome than with the manner in which it was achieved. Whether or not the same or similar costs of help influence the decision to

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seek help in children of various ages and in various problem contexts is a question for empirical study. Another factor that could conceivably affect children’s decisions to seek help is their perception of societal norms regarding help-seeking. Fischer and Torney (1976) have suggested that knowledge of norms of sex-typed behavior are among the factors that may affect the decision to seek help in kindergarten boys and girls, To the extent that children are aware of and have adopted sex-role stereotypes, asking for and receiving help may be seen as a more appropriate problem-solving strategy for girls than for boys. The opportunity provided by the environment to seek assistance from others might also influence the decision to seek help. For example, classroom organizations or task structures that encourage cooperation and communication among peers, perhaps via group problemsolving, might encourage help-seeking, as would a teacher’s or parent’s encouragement of cooperation and helping in learning situations. It is likely that in many classroom settings children may receive “mixed messages” about the relative value of independent individual effort versus cooperative learning. An appropriate line of inquiry, then, is to investigate the influence of children’s interpretation of these societal and classroom norms and values on their perceptions of the opportunities for and appropriateness of using others as resources, and on their decisions to seek help. Identification of Potential Hefper(s) Once the decision has been made to seek help the child must identify potential helpers. It is important, then, to know more about children’s perceptions of helpers and their characteristics. Many factors, including personal characteristics of the potential helper and of the help-seeker, and situational characteristics of the helping context, may singly or in interaction determine which individuals will be selected to provide help. Important factors include the sex and age of the help-seeker and the potential helper (DePaulo, 1978; Druian & DePaulo, 1977; Northman, 1978; Nelson & Gumerman, Note 3); the potential helper’s role relationship or status (e.g., relative, friend, leader, tutor) vis-a-vis the helpee (Bachman, 1975; Rosen, Powell, & Schubot, 1977; Shapiro, 1980); and his or her willingness to help, sensitivity, and expertise or competence (Barnett, Holland, & Kobasigawa, Note 5). The socioeconomic status of the help-seeker may also be related to preferences for certain categories of helpers (e.g., Zaffy, Note 6). The literature on children’s preferences for helpers is sparse indeed. When the available literature is examined, one finds that few of the relevant studies have obtained children’s spontaneous nominations for helpers, and those that have did not specify the problem context within

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which help was solicited (e.g., Bachman, 1975). Studies that have looked at choices for helpers on specific problems have not allowed the children to nominate helpers spontaneously; instead, the children are asked to indicate their preferences by rating each of a group of helpers generated by the interviewer (e.g., Northman, 1978). Preschool children’s helper choices have been found to be strongly influenced by the age of the potential helper (Edwards & Lewis, 1979; Nelson & Gumerman, Note 3). Children at this age level tended to prefer adults and older children. Edwards and Lewis (1979) reported, however, that preschoolers did indicate a preference for older peers when help involved a teaching function. Such research as exists on older children’s helper preferences suggests that peers are often preferred as helpers (Boehm, 1957; Northman, 1978; Nelson & Gumerman, Note 3). Bachman (1975) and Nelson and Gumerman (Note 3), allowing children to make spontaneous nominations, found that family, teachers, and friends were the most preferred helpers among first- through fifth-grade children. Whereas Bachman found mother to be the tirst choice in all grades, Nelson and Gumerman found that the choice of preferred helper shifted from parent to teacher to peer with increasing age. They also found that preferences for helpers and reasoning about helper motivations in specific situations differed for boys and girls. Boehm (1957), using a forced-choice format, found that with increasing age elementary school children tended to prefer advice on a problem from a talented peer rather than from an adult described as having no competence in the problem area. Barnett et al. (Note 5) asked children in kindergarten, third, and sixth grade to describe the characteristics of effective helpers and the type of information the helper would need in order to be effective. Children’s answers were examined for reference to the following specific helper characteristics: willingness to help; awareness or sensitivity to helpee’s needs, feelings, and capabilities; and competence in the form of skills or knowledge adequate to meet particular helping task requirements. Barnett et al. (Note 5) report an increase with age in children’s knowledge of traits and skills likely to distinguish effective helpers and an increase in their tendency to appraise aspects of the helping task when presented with a helping problem. Whereas the characteristics of effective helpers spontaneously generated by kindergarten children were few and consisted mostly of global social traits (e.g., nice, kind, helpful), older children not only generated more characteristics overall, but also spontaneously demonstrated ability to analyze the helping task and to describe competence and sensitivity to the helpee’s needs as critical attributes of an effective helper. The developmental trends found in Barnett et al.‘s (Note 5) study are

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supported by Stipek and Tannatt’s (Note 7) work on children’s judgments of academic competence. Stipek and Tannatt reported significant age differences among kindergarten through third-grade children in their criteria for evaluation of their classmates’ academic competence. However, exactly what is developing with respect to children’s knowledge about helpers is not clear. It may be that young children do not consider competence a criterion for effectiveness as a helper; or it may be that, as Stipek and Tannatt’s work suggests, young children view competence as an important criterion but differ from older children and adults in how they infer the competence or ability of others. Although the Barnett et al. (Note 5) and Stipek and Tannatt (Note 7) studies do not focus directly on help-seeking, they do suggest developmental trends in the types of skills we would expect to be involved in help-seeking. We know little about the lines along which children discriminate in seeking out peers and adults for help (Barrett & Yarrow, 1977). Clearly, more research is needed to determine which attributes of the helper and of the helping tasks influence whom children of different sexes and different ages approach for help. Employment

of Strategies

to Elicit Help

Once a potential helper has been identified, the helpee must enlist his or her help. The strategies employed by the child to accomplish this are important to the ultimate success or failure of the help-seeking attempt. An explanation of the dashed arrows in Fig. 1 is necessary at this point. These arrows refer to two options available to individuals if they should find that their efforts to obtain help from another person are not totally successful. One option, which is represented by the shorter dashed arrow, would be to keep trying to get help from the helper initially chosen, either by sticking with the same strategy or by changing it. The other option (the longer dashed arrow) would be to abandon the initial choice of a helper and to identify other potential helpers to approach. Just as the help-seeker should take into consideration task demands and helper characteristics when choosing a helper, so should he or she be sensitive to these factors when selecting a help-seeking strategy to employ. The help-seeker needs to consider how the request for help will be presented to the potential helper. Studying adult helping behavior, Langer and Abelson (1972) identified two factors relevant to making an appeal for help. The first concerns the orientation of the requestwhether it emphasizes an urgent personal need in an attempt to evoke sympathy in the target person, or whether it emphasizes the duty of the target person to help. The second factor involves the legitimacy of the appeal-whether it is constructed so as to be perceived by the target person as appropriate and compelling, or whether it is likely to be per-

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ceived as illegitimate and presumptuous. In addition to how the request for help is presented to the potential helper, another factor affecting the effectiveness of help-seeking attempts is the degree of overlap the helpseeker and the helper share in their definition of the “problem.” The help-seeker and the helper may need to renegotiate the ways to think about the task before helping can proceed (Levin & Kareev, 1980). Among the means a child might employ to ask for help are nonverbal and verbal strategies. For example, nonverbal strategies might include the child’s simply placing himself or herself in proximity to the helper, attempting to establish eye contact, watching others’ behavior for a guide to performance, or using physical gestures to indicate confusion or exasperation. Verbal help-seeking strategies might include the child’s asking for help directly or indirectly, soliciting information about the problem at hand or about the helper’s abilities vis-a-vis the problem, making statements about his or her own state of competence, and reminding the helper of some obligation to help. The literature on the development of persuasive appeals, which has identified tactics used by children in convincing others to accede to their requests (e.g., Bearison & Gass, 1979; Bragg, Ostrowski, & Finley, 1973; Clark & Delia, 1976; Finley & Humphreys, 1974; Piche, Rubin, & Michlin, 1978), suggests that the important questions for research in this context concern flexibility in the strategies used to obtain help, i.e., whether the strategies employed vary with the age and sex of the helpee and targeted helper and whether the strategies are also sensitive to the demands of the problem (task) for which help is being solicited. Merritt (Note 8) studied classroom discourse and found age differences in the means employed by children to seek information from their teachers and peers. It has been found that children’s knowledge of the norms for behavior in helping relationships held by peers and adults in their environment relates to peer acceptance (Hartup, Glazer, & Charlesworth, 1967; Ladd & Oden, 1979). For example, physical aggression, verbal insult or attack, and ordering and demanding may not be the most effective strategies for obtaining help from adults, but among peers in a group situation these techniques may be quite effective (Ladd & Oden, 1979). Verbal strategies, such as asking questions to obtain needed information, may be used with varying degrees of success by help-seekers of different ages. For example, in seeking information, a child could ask the same question in any of several forms. To get help with an arithmetic problem, a child might ask a yes-no question (“Does the sum of 14 and 17 equal 31?“) or a Wh- question (“What is the sum of 14 and 17?“). It should be noted that these question forms place different cognitive burdens on speaker and listener (Cazden, 1972). With Wh- questions the

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cognitive burden falls on the listener; with yes-no questions the cognitive burden falls on the speaker. Thus, it is potentially more difficult in the former case and less difficult in the latter case for the listener to respond to the question (i.e., respond to the request for help). The effectiveness of nonverbal strategies may also vary with the helpseeker’s age. For very young children, nonverbal behaviors (e.g., expressions of confusion, establishing proximity and eye contact, and even crying) may be effective strategies for obtaining assistance from parents; however, many of these same strategies might be counterproductive when used by an older child seeking help from a parent. Moreover, these strategies are likely to be inappropriate in other settings. The appropriateness and effectiveness of the help-seeking strategies that children employ are likely to depend upon the context in which help-seeking takes place. For example, although children entering school have experience in obtaining help from parents and other family members, their relationship with parents and siblings is different from that with teachers and initially unfamiliar peers. In addition, the tasks for which help is needed as well as the performance context may be different from children’s prior experiences. McKessar and Thomas (1978) reported cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal help-seeking strategies between New Zealand schoolchildren of Maori (aboriginal) and European family backgrounds. The reported differences, which were hypothesized to be related to differences in socialization, indicated that Maori children employed less verbal and direct help-seeking strategies than did children of European background and tended to use more nonverbal behaviors that involve having to wait until they are noticed by the adult present. Thus, acquiring new help-seeking strategies and adapting old ones for effective application to a new context may be one area of developmental change. Findings from the McKessar and Thomas study also illustrate the influences of the context on help-seeking, in that variations in help-seeking strategies employed by children were found to be related to offers of help, group size, and the opportunity for interaction with the teacher. As the above discussion suggests, the help-seeking strategies employed by children presumably need to be adapted to the environmental context in which they occur. We know little, however, about how learning environments promote or inhibit children’s dispositions toward help-seeking. Regarding help-seeking in the school environment, one might investigate (a) the physical and structural features of the classroom setting that affect the type and effectiveness of strategies that children use to procure help, (b) aspects of the teacher’s style of interaction and instruction that affect how help is sought, (c) how the teacher’s attitudes toward help-seeking and behavioral responses to students who seek help affect children’s

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help-seeking, and (d) whether such variables as children’s age, sex, SES, academic competence, and popularity moderate how the factors mentioned above affect help-seeking activity. Reactions

to Help-Seeking

Attempt(s)

The final component of the help-seeking model concerns the helpee’s outcomes and his or her reactions to help-seeking attempts. In describing the help-seeking process, we have assumed that help-seeking functions as a goal-directed activity. Therefore, probably the most important outcome variable would be whether or not the child is successful in obtaining the required help. If children are unsuccessful in obtaining a targeted helper’s involvement or if the help received does not further progress toward goal attainment, then they must re-evaluate their strategies for obtaining help and/or their choice of helper. The selection of helpers and attempts to engage their help may be repeated until the needed help is obtained; if the help-seeking activity is ultimately unsuccessful, the children may desist from active attempts to resolve the task or problem situation. If successful in their help-seeking, children will be likely to have (a) increased the probability of future success, inasmuch as the help was instrumental to learning and achievement, (b) increased or sustained perceptions of themselves as learners and goal achievers, and (c) increased their skills in utilizing appropriate strategies for positive, instrumental interactions within a helping relationship. Researchers who study adult recipients’ reactions to aid have found it useful to classify the specific responses that may occur as follows: (a) external perceptions (e.g., positive or negative evaluations of the helper and the help); (b) self-perceptions (e.g., positive or negative self-esteem); and (c) behavioral responses, such as termination or prolongation of the relationship and reciprocation of help (Fisher, Nadler, & Whitcher, Note 9). Characteristics of the helper, the help, the helpee, and the helping context have been studied with respect to their impact on helpee reactions. Such variables as the donor’s expertise, friendship, relative social status, and whether the donor is acting “in role” or is a social comparison other may moderate reactions to help. The amount of aid obtained may also affect recipient reactions. The SES, sex, personality (e.g., selfesteem), and need state of the helpee also appear to affect reactions. Finally, characteristics of the helping context, such as the anonymity of the helper, whether or not aid is expected, and the opportunity or lack of opportunity to reciprocate have been found to moderate recipients’ reactions. (See Fisher et al., in press, for a comprehensive review of this literature .) With the exception of Northman’s (1978) study, investigations of developmental differences in the helpee’s reactions to and evaluation of

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help-seeking are virtually nonexistent. Northman (1978) studied preferences for help among third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth graders. His findings suggest that preference for help increases with age; that more older children prefer help than younger ones; and that girls prefer help more than boys. It is quite plausible that children’s reactions to aid differ in significant ways from those of adults. For example, young children’s knowledge of role expectations and appropriate “in role” behavior is often confused and incomplete (Corsaro, 1979). Moreover, young children appear not to accept reciprocity norms for helping behavior (Berndt, 1979). Thus, for example, they may tend not to believe that they are obligated to return favors or that someone they have helped in the past would feel obligated to help them. Finally, young children do not appear to be sensitive to social comparison information for self-evaluative purposes (Ruble, Parsons, & Ross, 1976). The nature of the responses children have to helpseeking and the factors that moderate these responses remain questions for empirical investigation. OVERVIEW

AND CONCLUSION

In the prior sections, instrumental help-seeking was defined as an active social-cognitive skill that is essential to learning and achievement. In these sections it was argued that one can formally distinguish instrumental help-seeking from passive dependency, as well as from the actual giving and receiving of help. Finally, a heuristic model of the help-seeking process was formulated, prior research relevant to the model was reviewed, and ideas for research on help-seeking in children were suggested within the framework of this model. Inasmuch as those beginning research on help-seeking will be working in a relatively unstudied area, the predominant plan of attack prescribed is a “developmental-descriptive” one (see Flavell, 1963, pp. 422-424; Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis, 1968, for a more detailed discussion of this approach). The first step in this approach is to work out an overall conceptualization of the general skill area of help-seeking. Such a conceptualization was presented in an earlier section of this paper as a heuristic model of help-seeking, describing what help-seeking might entail and what aspects of the process might be expected to show developmental changes. The second step consists of trying to differentiate a number of more specific subskills within the general help-seeking domain with the aim of getting a perspective on what sorts of things develop at roughly what ages in the domain. Once the help-seeking domain has been at least roughly differentiated into some of its component subskills and the gross developmental profile for each subskill has been delineated, the causal and correlational network in which these skills are embedded can be explored. Research can then proceed to investigate possible antecedents

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of individual differences in help-seeking, such as social class and ethnic background, sex, and parent-child relations. Further research should also attend closely to contemporaneous variables associated with individual differences, such as general intelligence, role-taking skills, academic achievement, and situational-contextual constraints, such as current social relations with adults and peers and classroom organization. In responding to the lack of positive attention given to children’s helpseeking skills, researchers must be wary of isolating children’s helpseeking activities from the immediate helping interactions and the broader social interchange of which these activities are a part. Moreover, there is a great need for research to investigate the relationship between social thought, behavior, and competence in the everyday environment (Shantz, 1975). The research prospectus thus calls for efforts to generate an integrated picture of the relations between knowledge, behavior, and competence in the help-seeking domain. That is, research will need to determine (a) what children know about various factors that may influence the probability of procuring effective assistance with their problems, (b) the degree to which that knowledge is manifested in behavior in real-life settings (i.e., do children actually do what they say they should or would do), and (c) the degree to which children’s knowledge and behaviors relate to productive and mutually satisfying interactions with adults and peers that are adaptive to learning environments. To this end a variety of research methodologies will need to be employed. These methods include (a) the collection of naturalistic observational data to reveal the frequency, form, and function of help-seeking activity as it occurs in the social interchanges children have with others in the classroom and other task settings; (b) the collection of verbal protocol data through sensitive clinical interviewing to reveal children’s knowledge of what is involved in seeking help, and their perception of the opportunities and sanctions in specific situations for help-seeking; and (c) the collection of data using structured interview and experimental procedures to provide a systematic isolation and investigation of developmental aspects of the component skills of effective help-seeking. In conclusion, it appears that the striking imbalance between the profusion of articles, monographs, and books on help-giving and prosocial behavior which emphasize only the helper’s role and the paucity of articles on help-seeking attests to more than simply the vagaries of trends in developmental research. By failing to look at helping also from the perspective of the one who seeks help, we have neglected to pursue an important lead in understanding why some children are able to learn and progress independently despite obstacles that serve to defeat other children. It may be that for certain children under certain conditions the capacity for help-seeking can offset such obstacles as high child-caretaker

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REFERENCE

NOTES

1. Nelson, S. A., & Scott-Jones. D. Teachers’ and young children’s beliefs about the role of task persistence in academic achievement. Unpublished manuscript, University of Pittsburgh, 1981. 2. Gordon, E. Personal communication, December 12, 1980. 3. Nelson, S. A., & Gumerman, R. A. Children’s rrasoning about potential helpers in academic and social situations. Unpublished manuscript, University of Pittsburgh, 1981. 4. Futterman, R., & Karabenick, J. KnoM*/edge of task difficulty in preschool and kindergarten children. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, San Francisco, March 1979. 5. Barnett, K., Holland, C., & Kobasigawa, A. Children’s cognitions about effedl*e helping. Paper presented at the Southeastern Conference on Human Development, Alexandria, Virginia, April 1980. 6. Zatfy, D. Help-seeking behavior in second. fourth. and sixth grade Negro boys of lo,~,

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and middle socioeconomic SZ~~US.Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1969. 7. Stipek, D. J., & Tannatt, L. M. Children’s judgments of academic competence. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980. 8. Merritt, M. Service-like events during individual work time and their contribution to the nature af communication in primary classrooms. (Final report for Grant NIE G-78-0081 of the National Institute of Education). Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1980. 9. Fisher, J., Nadler, A., & Whitcher, S. Recipient reactions to aid: A conceptual review and a new theoretica/ framework. Unpublished manuscript, University of Connecticut, 1979. RECEIVED:

December

11,

1980; REVISED:

February 24, 1981