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tapping into students' levels of effort expended, as well as their willingness to con-
tinue to try even when presented with difficult material. Students responded on a 1
(
almost never
)to4(
almost always
) in those scales.
Finally, six questions were adapted from Meuschke, Dembo, and Gribbons's
(2006) Adaptive Help-Seeking Scale to assess students' use of
maladaptive help-
seeking
strategies (e.g., guessing, simply avoiding the work, or giving up the
task without asking for help). The items were scored on a five-point scale rang-
ing from 1 (
not at all true
)to5(
very much true
)(
0.72). Each of the
scales above was averaged to form nine distinct constructs (
Elaboration, Control,
Maladaptive help-seeking, Effort, Worry, Academic efficacy, Mastery goal orien-
tation, Performance approach goal orientation,
and
Performance avoidance goal
orientation
).
Academic achievement
. The outcome variable of this study was measured by
students' total GPA (
M
α
=
=
2.92,
SD
=
0.52).
Procedure
Data were obtained from the Office of Institutional Research in the form of a list
of all 16,488 students registered at the college for the 2006 Fall quarter. Graduate
students were deleted from the list, as were students who were not American citi-
zens. Further, students with no contact information were deleted. The final sampling
frame contained contact information for 11,569 undergraduate students. Our data
were collected in the fall of 2006 using two methods of data collection—a phone
survey that included 3,523 students (2,232 non-Hispanics and 1,295 Hispanics)
and an online survey that included 2,012 students (1,306 non-Hispanics and 705
Hispanics).
Telephone interview
. Students were initially contacted by phone in order to
explain the purpose of the research. Interviewers asked the student respondents a
few questions to elicit some basic demographic data as well as some initial ques-
tions regarding their learning strategies. In addition, interviewers confirmed the
student's e-mail address so that a link to a web survey could be sent. The link to
the web survey was then sent to each student, with at least two follow-up reminders
sent to all non-respondents. In addition, a lottery system was used by which stu-
dents could win money/coupons to be used to purchase items at the University's
bookstore.
In the telephone survey part of the data collection, telephone surveys on demo-
graphics and students' background were conducted by trained staff from a research
institute of the college, using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI)
equipment and software. In an effort to ensure the quality and reliability of the
interviews, institute research staff supervised all interviews conducted. To further
ensure quality control, supervisory personnel randomly selected completed inter-
views (at least one completion per interviewer) and made call-backs for verification.
A pairwise method was used for missing data.
