The availability of ICT and online resources has impacted students' approaches to learning (Broadbent & Lodge, 2021; Miklyaeva & Bezgodova, 2020). While the Internet provides unlimited access to information, it also presents an opportunity for students to avoid real engagement with educational material, potentially prioritizing ready-made solutions over deep learning (Makara & Karabenick, 2013). Such behavior exhibits executive help-seeking as defined by Stewart Karabenick, when students prefer to seek help, which would ease their task and allow them to invest as less time and efforts as possible. This contrasts with instrumental help-seeking where students value the educational process itself, actively seeking detailed explanations (Karabenick & Knapp, 1991). The frequent use of executive help has been linked with a decline in the acquisition of essential problem-solving skills and lower academic achievement (Green et al., 2012; Zhu et al., 2011).

Our study is focused on academic help seeking on the Web, in particular, the association between students’ help-seeking preferences and academic motivation, and their relations with academic achievement. We hypothesize that higher levels of motivation lead students to engage more deeply in learning, investing time and effort into understanding the material using online resources, resulting in higher academic achievements. Conversely, we expect that lower levels of motivation provoke students toward seeking easily accessible, ready-made answers and decrease their academic outcomes (Algharaibeh, 2020; Karabenick, 2003).

We collect the data in Russian secondary schools and rely on the questions developed for Russian context with the existing Russian-language Internet resources. These resources include platforms which either present readily available solutions to textbook exercises or in-depth explanations and supplementary study materials. There virtually no Russian platforms that provide both, making our research easier, as we assume that these two types of platforms cater to students with either executive or instrumental strategies of academic help-seeking respectively. We also measured offline help-seeking behavior, when students ask their classmates for help; for this purpose, we developed a 6-item Likert scale. Quantitative approach was supplemented by qualitative methods: we conducted several focus groups providing us with better understanding of students’ practices of using academic help from their peers and from Internet resources.

This study employed a quantitative cross-sectional design with a questionnaire addressing the academic motivation, help-seeking strategies, and academic performance as well as other students’ attitudes and characteristics. The data were collected by HSE Laboratory for Sociology in Education in 2024 using a survey of secondary school students in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Since some students were under 14 years, we received informed consent from their parents in advance. Students’ online help-seeking was assessed through several Likert-scale questions measuring the frequency of use of various online platforms with the educational materials: platforms presenting online tools for additional learning (educational videos, MOOCs, online textbooks etc.) and platforms that offer ready-made solutions to standard textbook tasks. Students’ offline help-seeking was assessed through several Likert-scale questions asking how often they address their peers for either ready-made answers (copying solved problems etc.) or additional explanations. Academic motivation measure is a composite index consisting of several items on a Likert scale measuring students’ attitude towards learning (e.g., the desire to learn new things, how much they enjoy studying etc.). Academic performance was measured as a grade point average (GPA) based on students self-reported grades for major academic subjects from the end of the previous academic year. While self-reported GPA is subject to some limitations, it is a commonly used and accepted measure in educational research. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to establish the validity of the theoretically driven distinction between executive and instrumental help-seeking in this study’s sample. Then structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to assess the relationships among academic motivation, instrumental and executive help-seeking strategies, and GPA. SEM allowed for a simultaneous analysis of direct and indirect relationships among the variables. The analysis was conducted using R statistical software. To understand common practices of help-seeking we conducted eight focus groups in several schools for which we selected students of varying academic performance. Groups had five to seven participants and lasted from 45 to 60 minutes. Students were encouraged to discuss concrete instances of help-seeking as well as share their motivation for different strategies.

There is a clear association between studied variables. More motivated students mainly used instrumental strategy and demonstrated higher GPA. In contrast, those who are not really interested in studying relied more on executive resources and had lower GPA. These results are consistent with the theoretical division between instrumental and executive help-seeking, suggesting that it is applicable for online context as well (Karabenick & Knapp, 1991; Aguilar & Puga, 2020). However, the direct effect of executive help-seeking on GPA became statistically insignificant when academic motivation was added to the model as a predictor of GPA. This finding suggests that the relationship between executive help-seeking and academic achievement is not obvious. This outcome might be explained by the fact that almost 80% of the sample reported using from time to time the resources with ready-made solutions. Nevertheless, it seems that not all the students who visited these resources used them for easing up their educational tasks. Focus groups show that some students use resources with ready-made answers as part of their self-regulated learning strategy. These students use such resources as a tool for self-learning, not just as a method to avoid work. For instance, when facing difficult math problems, some students may use online solutions not to copy answers but to understand the correct approach of problem-solving. There were instances when, after looking up online solutions, students approached either teachers or other students asking them for additional explanations. We maintain that our findings create a new perspective on the academic help-seeking behavior of school students using online resources. These findings blur the boundaries between executive and instrumental help-seeking strategies and challenge the models that establish their impact on academic outcomes. It is important to explore the reasons behind the choice of educational Internet resources without judging them as worsening students’ educational efforts.

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