This report describes self-reported attitudes and motivations of first-year college students nationally at the beginning of the undergraduate experience, based on a 100-item motivational assessment administered in the summer and fall of 2010. Highlighted this year are attitudes that may limit academic engagement, suggesting the need for…

Domestic violence is a growing social and health problem that affects many women each year. While the reasons that a great number of battered women stay in or return to an abusive relationship are multifaceted, reasons extracted from the domestic violence literature revealed that the lack of economic resources and the lack of financial…

Latino university students' responses to two surveys revealed three types: one recalls valuable family lessons, relates them to university experiences, and envisions how these experiences will have long-range benefits; the second is lonely, confused, and insecure; the third values cultural origins, but feels anxious and self-conscious. These types…

This study analyzes middle school students' spontaneous mathematics-related help-seeking behavior, in view of making ecologically valid recommendations for the design of supporting tools or "help systems". Our aim was to investigate the content of students' help-seeking messages--Are there different forms of help-seeking messages and do…

Strong mental and behavioral health supports on campus can improve the academic performance of students and increase their resilience and ability to handle stress, with reduced suicide rates, substance abuse, and eating disorders, but this study reveals that students with mental health disabilities continue to face barriers to accessing counseling…

How do counselors reach out to individuals who are reluctant to seek counseling services? To answer this question, the authors examined the research on the psychological help-seeking barriers from counseling, clinical and social psychology, as well as social work and psychiatry. Specific avoidance factors that have been identified in the mental…

This study tested the hypothesis that sex differences in help-seeking, which have been obtained consistently with adults and adolescents, would appear in early childhood. To this end, 32 girls and 32 boys aged 3 and 6 years from lower and upper-middle socio-economic class schools were asked to perform four tasks (drawing an animal, building a…

This paper offers support that those students who felt they had stronger reasons for committing unethical academic behaviors are more likely to report committing academic dishonesty than those who felt they had weaker reasons for unethical academic behaviors. This relationship held for all four categories of academic dishonesty: cheating (on…

Seeking help with academic tasks has been regarded as an important strategy to enhance student learning (Newman, 1994; Ryan, Gheen, & Midgley, 1998; Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1986). Seeking help is conceptualized as student-initiated efforts to secure task information or solicit advice when a deficiency in their understanding of the content…

This study examined a new achievement-goal approach to teacher motivation by testing the predictions that mastery and ability-avoidance goals for teaching would predict students' reports of teacher support for and inhibition of question asking and help seeking, as well as students' help seeking and cheating. Surveys were completed by 53 teachers…

Social support is one of the most effective means by which people can cope with stressful events. Yet little research has examined whether there are cultural differences in how people utilize their social support networks. A review of studies on culture and social support presents evidence that Asians and Asian Americans are more reluctant to…

Objective and Participants: From 2002 to 2005, the authors tested an interactive, Web-based method to encourage college students at risk for suicide to seek treatment. Methods: The authors invited students at 2 universities to complete an online questionnaire that screened for depression and other suicide risk factors. Respondents received a…

Previous findings on older adults' awareness of community support services (CSSs) have been inconsistent and marred by acquiescence or over-claiming bias. To address this issue, this study used a series of 12 vignettes to describe common situations faced by older adults for which CSSs might be appropriate. In telephone interviews, 1,152 adults…

The present study examines urbanicity-related differences in help-seeking process among preschool children with autism and investigates the factors associated with utilization of autism-related services within the year of diagnosis. Using the 1997-2004 National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) in Taiwan, we identified a total of 3495…

We examined how self-regulated learning (SRL) and externally-facilitated self-regulated learning (ERL) differentially affected adolescents' learning about the circulatory system while using hypermedia. A total of 128 middle-school and high school students with little prior knowledge of the topic were randomly assigned to either the SRL or ERL…