کمک جویی کودکان و تکانشگری

The aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between students' (100 children aged 8 to 12) help-seeking behavior and impulsivity. Help-seeking behavior was evaluated using a naturalistic experimental paradigm in which children were placed in a problem-solving situation and had the opportunity to seek help from the experimenter, if needed. Impulsivity was analyzed using the Hyperactivity–Impulsivity Scale from the Teacher Rating Form of the Multidimensional Peer Nomination Inventory (TR-MPNI), Circle Tracing Task (CTT), Matching Familiar Figures (MFF), and Impulsiveness and Venturesomeness scales from the Eysenck Junior I6 questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) showed that impulsivity was not related to children's question asking. Different correlational patterns were found for question asking and other help-seeking variables (i.e., performance scores and mean reflection time preceding question asking). The two Eysenck Junior I6 scales showed no significant correlations with other measures. The importance of considering the many sidedness of both help-seeking and impulsivity constructs is discussed.

Educational psychologists have now amply documented the beneficial effects of selective help seeking on learning and understanding. Instrumental (Nelson-Le Gall, 1985), adaptive (Newman, 1994), strategic (Karabenick, 1998), or self-regulating (Puustinen, 1998) help seekers do not rush headlong into questioning. Rather, they begin first by trying to solve the problems themselves, and if asking for help from someone more competent proves to be necessary, they restrict their questions to just those hints and explanations needed to allow them to finish solving the problems by themselves. In short, this kind of help seeking can be considered a strategy for self-regulated learning (SRL). Research on help seeking within educational psychology has mostly dealt with three out of four aspects of the help-seeking process, namely, (meta)cognitive, motivational and affective, and social and interactional aspects. The (meta) cognitive aspect refers to studies that focus mainly on the actual question-asking behavior (e.g., Graesser & Person, 1994, Karabenick & Knapp, 1988, Puustinen, 1998, van der Meij, 1990 and van der Meij & Dillon, 1994). The motivational and affective side of the help-seeking process has been most often explored through goal orientations (e.g., Arbreton, 1998, Butler & Neuman, 1995, Karabenick, 2003, Newman, 1990, Newman & Schwager, 1995 and Ryan & Pintrich, 1997), but also through perceptions of competence (Nelson-Le Gall, De Cooke, & Jones, 1989), self-efficacy (Puustinen & Winnykamen, 1998), and self-esteem Karabenick & Knapp, 1991 and van der Meij, 1989. The social and interactional aspect emphasizes the inherently social nature of the help-seeking process and the role of contextual factors in it (e.g., Karabenick, 1994, Nelson-Le Gall & Glor-Scheib, 1986, Newman & Schwager, 1993, Ryan et al., 1998 and Winnykamen, 1993). The fourth aspect, behavior, is present, at least implicitly, in all help seeking; asking for help necessarily involves the help-seeker's activity. This aspect has not been well developed by educational psychologists. Pintrich (2000), however, put forth this point recently by referring to help seeking as a behavioral strategy in his model of SRL. According to the model, SRL is composed of four phases, labeled forethought, monitoring, control, and reflection phases. For each phase, self-regulatory activities are detailed in cognitive, motivational and affective, behavioral, and contextual areas. Help-seeking behavior is classified as a behavioral control activity in SRL “because it involves the person's own behavior” (Pintrich, 2000, p. 468). From the educational viewpoint, impulsivity as an aspect of behavioral self-regulation is of particular importance. Impulsivity has been demonstrated to be associated with disorganization, poor planning, lack of effective problem solving, failure to deploy mnemonic strategies, deficient self-monitoring (Levine & Jordan, 1987), high error scores Brunas-Wagstaff et al., 1994 and Victor et al., 1985, and poor academic performance (Kipnis, 1971). According to the review by Messer (1976), impulsive children use worse problem-solving strategies than reflective children do in tasks where the answer is not immediately obvious. More recently, children with high levels of aggressive–hyperactive–inattentive behavior have been shown to have lower levels of academic achievement skills (Shelton et al., 1998). In boys only, Hyperactivity–Impulsivity has been linked to reading disability (Willcutt & Pennington, 2000), and Hyperactivity–Impulsivity–attention problems appear to be associated with low grade point average and low self-evaluation of academic skills (Loeber, Brinthaupt, & Green, 1990). Generally, Hyperactivity–Impulsivity is more typical of boys than of girls Logue & Chavarro, 1992, Newcorn et al., 2001, Nolan et al., 1999 and Sandberg, 1996. One of the very rare empirical studies dealing with help seeking and behavioral self-regulation comes from Bembenutty and Karabenick (1998). However, neither impulsivity nor help seeking was specifically the focus of their study. They examined the role of academic delay of gratification (ADOG, i.e., postponement of immediate satisfaction of impulses in favor of more valuable and temporally remote academic goals) in college students' SRL strategies. Impulsivity, evaluated by the adaptation of the Buss & Plomin, 1984 and Buss, 1995 Impulsivity Scale, was added to the comparisons to test the discriminant validity of ADOG. Help seeking, on the other hand, was included in the Motivational Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1993). ADOG was positively related to most of the SRL strategies tested, including help seeking; it was also more strongly related to SRL strategies than was impulsivity. Impulsivity was not related to help seeking. The authors emphasize the strategic importance of ADOG and suggest that it may be considered a strategy for SRL (see, also, Bembenutty, 1999). Impulsivity is a complex construct that has been defined in numerous ways in the literature, from behavioral, cognitive, and personality perspectives. Within the behavioral approach, impulsivity has often been considered a manifestation of poor behavioral control (White et al., 1994), an unrestrained reaction style (Wallace, Newman, & Bachorowski, 1991), or a behavioral strategy reflecting high reactivity and rather low emotion regulation Pulkkinen, 1995 and Pulkkinen, 1996. Cognitive definitions connect an inability to control and restrain cognitive activity Schachar & Logan, 1990 and Visser et al., 1996 and a rapid responding at the expense of correct solutions (Kagan, Rosman, Kay, Albert, & Phillips, 1964) to characteristics associated with impulsivity. From the personality psychology perspective, impulsivity has been often regarded as a personality trait. Dickman (1990) distinguishes two types of impulsivity. Dysfunctional impulsivity, a tendency to act with less forethought when this tendency is problematic, seems to reflect an inability to inhibit competing responses Brunas-Wagstaff et al., 1996 and Brunas-Wagstaff et al., 1994. Functional impulsivity, in contrast, is the tendency to act with relatively little forethought when such a style is optimal (Dickman, 1990), which is related to the speed of information processing Brunas-Wagstaff et al., 1994 and Brunas-Wagstaff et al., 1996. In addition, for Eysenck, Easting, and Pearson (1984) and Eysenck, Pearson, Easting, and Allsop (1985), impulsivity can be divided into two main factors, impulsiveness and venturesomeness. Impulsiveness is typical of people who act on the spur of the moment without awareness of the risk involved, whereas venturesomeness describes people well aware of the risks but prepared to chance it (Eysenck et al., 1984). In addition to difficulties in defining impulsivity, it has also proved to be problematic to operationalize it. As concluded by Olson (1996), different laboratory measures of impulsivity have typically shown negligible to low associations with one another. This has been explained by arguing that the diversity of the construct of impulsivity itself would explain the low connections between the different methods (e.g., Carrillo-de-la-Peña et al., 1993 and Malle & Neubauer, 1991), and that the methods depend on age and intelligence (Milich & Kramer, 1984), measure different concepts Barratt & Patton, 1983, Carrillo-de-la-Peña et al., 1993 and Gerbing et al., 1987, and rely on different informants (e.g., parent, teacher, peer, and oneself; Achenbach et al., 1987, Reynolds & Stark, 1986 and White et al., 1994). The diversity of the results might thus be due to differences in the evaluation methods, but it might also simply reflect the fact that our behavior varies from one situation to another Achenbach et al., 1987 and Milich & Kramer, 1984. In order to evaluate impulsivity as reliably as possible, it seems important, then, to use not only several informants but also several methods reflecting the different theoretical orientations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the connections between children's help seeking and different types of impulsivity. In addition, we were interested in how the different measures of impulsivity would be associated with each other. We evaluated children's help-seeking behavior using a naturalistic experimental paradigm in which children were placed in a problem-solving situation and had the opportunity to seek help from the experimenter, if needed. Good or self-regulated question asking was defined as one that is selective, that is, restricted in quality (i.e., asking exclusively for questions—hints and explanations—aimed at understanding the resolution principle) and in quantity (i.e., asking for hints and explanations only when it is necessary, e.g., using previously received hints and explanations in analogous tasks instead of asking for the same hints or explanations again). Furthermore, self-regulated use of the help-seeking strategy is associated with a good performance in the help-seeking tasks, as well as with a long rather than a short reflection time before the actual question asking. Impulsivity, on the other hand, was studied using two informants (i.e., children themselves and their teachers) and four methods reflecting the different theoretical approaches (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and personality psychology approaches) to impulsivity. Bembenutty and Karabenick (1998), who evaluated students' help seeking using a questionnaire developed by Pintrich et al. (1993), in which students' intentions to use help seeking as a learning strategy were mapped out, did not find a connection between help seeking and impulsivity. At the same time, however, studies on impulsivity (e.g., Messer, 1976 and Shelton et al., 1998) have reported impulsivity and related phenomena to be associated more with worse problem-solving strategies and academic achievement skills than with reflectivity. On the basis of these seemingly contradictory results, we expected impulsivity to be related to children's help seeking: less strongly to children's actual question-asking behavior (i.e., quantity and type of questions asked for) than to the other help-seeking variables (i.e., performance in the help-seeking tasks, mean reflection time preceding question asking). Given that gender differences have been reported in studies on impulsivity (e.g., Logue & Chavarro, 1992, Newcorn et al., 2001, Nolan et al., 1999 and Sandberg, 1996), we controlled for the effect of gender on the results. Furthermore, age differences have been reported in studies on children's help seeking (e.g., Puustinen, 1998); therefore, we also controlled for the effect of age on the results. Finally, given that the help-seeking material consisted of tasks requiring mathematical reasoning, the effect of children's intellectual capacity on the results was controlled for.