ABSTRACT
Students often do not take an active role in their own learning. For one thing, they tend not to seek help from their teacher or classmates when they encounter academic difficulties. Despite awareness of difficulties they may have, and despite availability of assistance, many students tend to persist unsuccessfully on their own, give up prematurely, or sit passively, waiting for the teacher to come to them. Recent research aimed at understanding why this is the case and what can be done to help students become more active and successful learners is based on the assumption that help seeking can be viewed as an adaptive strategy of self-regulated learning (see Schunk & Zimmerman, 1994). Self-regulated learners are characterized by their purposeful control over academic outcomes. Their activity is combined with goals of learning and beliefs of efficacy; they monitor their performance and apply cognitive and environmental resources as tasks demand. As such, self-regulated learners are aware of occasional difficulty and have the wherewithal, self-determination, and sometimes even a sense of challenge, to remedy that difficulty.
