Academic help-seeking skills are vital to postsecondary students’ long-term achievement, yet modern computing students face an ever-expanding landscape of help resources with very little explicit guidance on effective help-seeking approaches. Although substantial effort has been devoted to investigate computing students’ help-seeking behavior, there is a lack of interventions designed for enhancing students’ capabilities of instrumental help-seeking.

Leveraging theoretical foundation from Karabenick and Makara’s help-seeking models, Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, and the Structure Of the Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy, as well as practical insights revealed by empirical studies in computing education, this research aims to design and evaluate the first intervention for introductory-level computing students specifically centered around effective help-seeking approaches. The goals of the intervention include (1) bolstering students’ self-efficacy in carrying out concrete actions in the process of academic help-seeking, and (2) enriching their (diverse) help-seeking approaches.

The research follows the Design-Based Research (DBR) regime and is currently in the pilot design phase. At the time of this doctoral consortium, it will have advanced to the refinement stage, where the feedback will be extremely valuable for refining both the intervention activity itself and the instruments this research develops for measuring its targeted goals.