Factor Focus: Help Seeking

The "Factor Focus" series is designed to review various noncognitive factors and their relevance to student success.

One of the most pervasive and frustrating questions when working in student success is this: what do you do when a student who clearly needs help never shows up to use it? The tutoring center is open. The counseling office has availability. The faculty member holds office hours. And yet, the student who is struggling - visibly, measurably - never shows.

Such behavior can be particularly galling when we see the opposite: a student who is struggling, expresses their vulnerability, puts in the effort, receives the support, and finds success. As heartwarming as these experiences are, the opposite is equally heartbreaking.

If we ask ourselves why these students don't ask for help or engage with resources, any number of answers can come to mind. Maybe they just don't want help. Maybe they aren't motivated. Maybe they have other priorities.

But I think these answers let us off the hook too easily. The research on help seeking tells a more complicated and more actionable story — one in which the question is not simply whether students seek help, but why they do or don't, what kind of help they seek, from whom, and at what perceived cost.

Within ISSAQ, Help Seeking is represented as one score, but theoretically is based on more complex work into how students perceive and pursue help in college settings. By more deeply understanding the research into help seeking behavior, perhaps we can be better at understanding how to engage students in this process.

What Is Help Seeking?

Stuart Karabenick spent decades developing one of the most comprehensive frameworks for understanding academic help seeking, and I find the most important contribution of that work is this: help seeking is not simply a matter of whether students seek help or not. And it is certainly not a matter of caring enough or being motivated enough to do so. Help seeking is a multidimensional process shaped by students' goals, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of cost and benefit, and the social context in which help is sought (Karabenick & Newman, 2006).

A few distinctions from this framework are particularly useful for practitioners. For one, Karabenick differentiates between instrumental help seeking (seeking help in order to understand and learn) and executive help seeking, which is essentially asking someone else to do the work for you (Karabenick, 2003). Instrumental help seeking is associated with better outcomes; executive help seeking, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not.

Additionally, there is the distinction between formal and informal sources of help. Students differ meaningfully in whether they are willing to seek help from instructors, advisors, and institutional services versus from peers and personal networks. Many students who would never visit a tutoring center will ask a classmate for help - and vice versa. Understanding which sources feel accessible, and why, is important context for designing interventions that actually reach students.

But I find the most important insight of Karabenick's work is the role of threat. For many students, seeking help carries a perceived social cost: the risk of appearing incompetent, unintelligent, or incapable. Karabenick (2004) found that agreement with the statement 'I would feel like a failure if I needed help in this class' was strongly correlated with unwillingness to seek help. This threat perception reflects real social dynamics, but it is also malleable. I would say, as much as any other aspect of Karabenick's model, threat is a central tenet of how we think about Help Seeking in ISSAQ.

That's because threat is perhaps the most important lesson for educators of all sorts to learn: Asking for help starts with vulnerability.

When going to tutoring, for example, a student in some sense is admitting - both to themselves and others - "I can't do this on my own." That's a tough admission to make for any of us, but it presents even greater challenges when students may already feel like an outsider.

For example, when a student comes from a traditionally underserved population - let's say a first-generation college student - the thought of asking for help can be just one more signal of that other-ness. Asking for help can feel like admitting that they don't belong. "It's just one more way they'll know I don't belong here."

Within ISSAQ, Help Seeking reflects students' general orientation toward seeking help as an acceptable, useful, and non-threatening strategy. Students who score low are not necessarily unmotivated: they may be deeply motivated to succeed. They have simply developed, through prior experience, a belief that asking for help is risky in ways that outweigh its benefits. That distinction matters enormously for how institutions should respond when their students aren't seeking help to the extent that they could or should.

How Does Help Seeking Impact Success?

The relationship between help seeking and academic outcomes is well documented. Karabenick (2003; 2004) found that students with higher levels of adaptive, instrumental help seeking performed better on exams and earned higher course grades. Robbins et al. (2004) confirmed in a large meta-analysis that help-seeking-related constructs predicted both GPA and retention above and beyond traditional academic predictors. The mechanism is fairly intuitive: students who seek help when they need it access resources that buffer against early academic difficulty, which is when most attrition risk is highest.

This is of no surprise. Good students seek help. As I often say, that's why tutoring centers are filled with B+ students trying to get an A, not D+ students trying to get a C. What is less intuitive — but critically important — is that the students who most need help are often the students least likely to seek it. Threat perceptions are highest among students who are most uncertain about their academic abilities, most concerned with how others perceive them, and most unfamiliar with the norms of college-level academic culture. First-generation students, students from underrepresented backgrounds, and students with prior negative experiences in academic settings may carry the highest perceived costs of help seeking into college — precisely when they are navigating the steepest learning curve.

Help Seeking also connects meaningfully to other ISSAQ factors. Asking for help is a critical part of Coping Strategies. Conversely, avoidance is, in a sense, the behavioral expression of help-seeking threat. Students low in Sense of Belonging may not seek help from formal sources because they do not yet feel that this institution's people are the kind of people they can turn to. Students low in Self-Efficacy may avoid help seeking because they fear that getting help will confirm, rather than challenge, their beliefs about their own inadequacy. In short, the litany of connections with other ISSAQ factors just supports Karabenick's nuanced articulation of help seeking behavior.

How Can We Foster Help Seeking?

Addressing Threat Perception Directly

Because help-seeking avoidance is often driven by threat perception rather than lack of awareness, awareness campaigns alone are insufficient. Institutions need to actively work to reframe what seeking help means.

One of my personal bug-a-boos is when student success efforts take an informational approach to help seeking. The thought is, "we need to teach the students what these resources are, where they can find them, etc." with the presumption that knowledge is the primary barrier to access. My thought has always been that a student who knows about resources but isn't willing to ask for help won't do anything; a student who is willing to ask for help but doesn't know where to go will ask someone.

When designing help seeking programming, peer voices are particularly effective here: hearing other students describe seeking help as normal and useful carries more credibility than institutional messaging alone (Karabenick & Newman, 2006).

Removing the Initiation Barrier

For students with high threat perceptions, the act of initiating help seeking — making the appointment, walking through the door, sending the email — can be the hardest part. Proactive and intrusive advising models address this directly by removing the need for initiation: the institution reaches out first. When advisors contact students rather than waiting, the psychological cost of first contact is substantially reduced. This is a good use case for ISSAQ data: identifying students with low Help Seeking scores and reaching out to them, as the old student affairs adage goes, "before they even know they need it."

Structuring Help Seeking into the Academic Experience

When help seeking is embedded structurally — required advising appointments, in-class peer collaboration, tutoring sessions built into course design — students who would never seek help independently are brought into contact with support without having to overcome their own resistance first. Crucially, these structured experiences can also shift students' underlying attitudes: a student who visits a tutoring center because it was required and has a positive experience is more likely to return voluntarily. Changing behavior can precede and produce attitude change (Ryan & Pintrich, 1997).

One practical tip here: Embedding services like tutoring and advising into developmental, co-requisite, or gateway courses is a great step (e.g., Richardson, 2021). Another simple trick is to have those offices visit classes, particularly if it's an FYE/student success course.

Thinking About Source, Not Just Availability

Karabenick's distinction between formal and informal help sources has practical implications for how institutions design their support ecosystems. A student who will not go to the writing center may respond to a peer writing partner. A student who will not email their professor may open up to a near-peer mentor. Building diverse, accessible, low-threat pathways to help — rather than relying solely on formal, institutional services — expands the range of students who can actually benefit.

It's another boost for peer mentoring/tutoring efforts as well. Rather than changing the source of help, establishing trained and capable peer resources make both options a viable path to success.

What Can Faculty Do to Support Help Seeking?

Faculty are often the first formal source of help students consider — and the first they rule out. The perceived approachability of an instructor shapes whether students with threat concerns will risk the exposure of asking for help. Faculty who explicitly invite questions, respond to confusion without judgment, and communicate genuine interest in students' learning create conditions under which help seeking feels safe. Faculty who respond to struggling students with dismissiveness or evaluation — even subtly — confirm the very fears that drive avoidance.

Faculty can also model instrumental help seeking by being transparent about their own intellectual process — the questions they ask colleagues, the resources they consult, the times they don't immediately know the answer. When students see that expertise involves ongoing inquiry rather than the absence of confusion, seeking help becomes less threatening and more obviously sensible.

Conclusion

Within ISSAQ, seeking help is - in many ways - the culmination of all the other factors we measure. Students who don't feel a Sense of Belonging are less likely to seek help. When students doubt themselves and lack Self-Efficacy, asking for help can be a challenge. Is seeking help not an integral part of persisting... or coping? If we don't believe we can change our ability (i.e., growth mindset/Effort Focus) , why would we bother to ask anyone to help us? And even in the presence of many of these factors, the lack of just one can be a significant barrier to students asking for help.

From the institutional perspective, the students who most need our support systems are often the ones least likely to use them. That is not a paradox to be explained away — it is a central challenge of student success work; and what Karabenick's research makes clear is that the barrier is rarely ignorance of what's available. It is a set of deeply held, often anxiety-driven beliefs about what asking for help says about a person. The reason we measure Help Seeking is that the data give institutions an early read on which students carry those beliefs into college — before the first failed exam, before the first missed deadline, before the slow, quiet withdrawal that precedes departure. That early signal creates an opportunity... not to simply point students at resources they already know exist, but to actively work on the attitudes and perceptions that determine whether those resources ever get used.

References

• Karabenick, S. A. (2003). Seeking help in large college classes: A person-centered approach. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 28(1), 37–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0361-476X(02)00012-7

• Karabenick, S. A. (2004). Perceived achievement goal structure and college student help seeking. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(3), 569–581. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.96.3.569

• Karabenick, S. A., & Newman, R. S. (Eds.). (2006). Help seeking in academic settings: Goals, groups, and contexts. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• Robbins, S. B., Lauver, K., Le, H., Davis, D., Langley, R., & Carlstrom, A. (2004). Do psychosocial and study skill factors predict college outcomes? A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 130(2), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.2.261

• Ryan, A. M., & Pintrich, P. R. (1997). "Should I ask for help?" The role of motivation and attitudes in adolescents' help seeking in math class. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(2), 329–341. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.89.2.329