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Unfortunately, students who need help the most are often those least likely to
seek it out (e.g. Ryan & Pintrich, 1997; 1998). In addition, while help-seeking can be
an important self-regulatory strategy, it is not necessarily always positive. Students
who are motivated by work-avoidance goals are reluctant to seek help or seek help
for the wrong reasons. Students may ask for assistance when it is not necessary, for
example, or when they have not attempted the work on their own. They may also be
motivated to seek help in order to complete a task and move on to other activities,
or they may seek help for social rather than academic reasons.
Test anxiety and worry
. There is a significant amount of work in the area of moti-
vation that has examined the role of affect or emotion on academic performance
(Hembree, 1988; Zeidner & Matthews, 2005). One important emotion is test anxi-
ety because of the obvious connections to achievement. Test anxiety is often seen as
a specific form of generalized anxiety, in reference to test or evaluative situations. It
is recognized as having phenomenological, physiological, and behavioral responses
that occur in conjunction with concern about possible negative consequences of low
performance (Zeidner, 1998). In addition, researchers often distinguish trait anxiety,
which is more stable and enduring, from state anxiety, which is more context-
specific (Covington, 1992; Spielberger, 1972). Test anxiety is also commonly seen
as having a cognitive component (worry) and an emotional component (emotionality
such as fear and uneasiness) (Zeidner & Matthews, 2005).
There are two general patterns in this literature. First, the negative effects of test
anxiety on performance are strong and consistent (Hembree, 1988; Hill & Wigfield,
1984). Hembree (1988) found an effect size of
0.33 in his meta-analysis between
test anxiety and achievement. Second, the worry component of test anxiety is more
closely linked to performance and achievement than the emotionality component
(Covington, 1992). The effects on performance have been suggested as resulting
from various sources including interference with attentional processes and thus
increased cognitive load, as well as to a more generalized lack of access to effi-
cient learning strategies which impacts encoding and retrieval (Schutz & Davis,
2000; Zeidner, 1998). Given these findings, it was hypothesized that worry would
be negatively related to achievement.
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Summary and Purpose of the Study
There is some evidence from large-scale research studies that there is invariance
among a broad range of cultural groups on self-regulatory, motivational, and learn-
ing strategy constructs (Marsh et al., 2006). However, there is also some evidence
for cultural specificity in these domains (McInerney & Van Etten, 2001; Urdan,
2004; Urdan & Giancarlo, 2001; Watkins, McInerney, Akande, & Lee, 2003; Rueda
& Chen, 2005; Vansteenviste, Zhou, Lens, & Soenens, 2005). While the learning
and motivation literature has increasingly recognized sociocultural factors as impor-
tant, there is only limited work exploring the robustness of the relationships among
these factors for students from different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups,
