In 2026, we mark the 45^th anniversary of research on student help seeking, a field initiated by the seminal work of Nelson-Le Gall (1981). This foundational paper distinguished between instrumental help seeking – where students request only the necessary assistance – and executive help seeking, where the goal is to delegate problem-solving entirely. By conceptualizing instrumental help seeking as “an active, complex social-cognitive activity that is essential to learning and achievement” (p. 224), Nelson-Le Gall paved the way for decades of inspiring research. Building on this legacy, our work focuses on young students’ academic help seeking, with a view to promoting children’s active participation and aligning with the European Commission’s 2013 recommendations on investing in children.

From a methodological perspective, researchers in this domain have typically relied on self-report measures, focusing more on students’ help-seeking intentions than on their actual help-seeking behavior (cf. Huet et al., 2013). Studies examining help-seeking behavior are methodologically diverse – for example, experimental situations (e.g., Puustinen, 1998), or computer recordings of human-machine help interactions (e.g., Wood & Wood, 1999) – and often lack ecological validity with respect to students’ actual help seeking in real classroom settings. The work by Zorn and Puustinen (2022) on French middle school students with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) represents one of the first attempts to capture this behavior. Students’ spontaneous classroom talk was video recorded, but only the help-seeking sequences were extracted from the data. In addition, when analyzing those sequences, the authors introduced a category termed ambiguous help seeking for students’ spontaneous statements that could not be coded unequivocally (e.g., “I don’t feel comfortable with this task”) but nevertheless prompted teachers to provide assistance; one third of their help-seeking data fell into this category.

While Zorn and Puustinen’s (2022) work highlights the importance of capturing spontaneous help-seeking behaviors in naturalistic settings, their focus on middle school students with ASD leaves a significant gap in our understanding of how help seeking manifests in other populations. Pre-primary classrooms, in particular, offer a unique context for studying help seeking: they are characterized by high levels of spontaneous verbal interaction and a strong emphasis on social learning. In Finland, these classrooms bring together students with diverse learner profiles. Yet, research on help seeking in this age group remains scarce.

Against this background, this paper addresses two related issues: we analyze the proportion that academic help seeking represents in Finnish pre-primary students’ all spontaneous classroom talk and develop and test a new coding scheme for naturally occurring help-seeking sequences, explicitly specifying what should and should not be considered as help seeking within naturally occurring classroom interaction.

Analyzing student help seeking as part of spontaneous student talk in the classroom provides valuable insights into its role in inclusive pre-primary classrooms dynamics. It allows researchers and educators to consider the entirety of children’s discourse. By adopting such a holistic approach to young children’s classroom discourse, we recognize them as active contributors to learning processes and contribute to a broader reflection on the conditions of educational knowledge production and whose voices are acknowledged within it. In sum, this approach offers a richer, ecologically valid understanding of classroom interactions and helps give children a voice in their own learning – a perspective only beginning to gain recognition in France.

This paper thus contributes to both theoretical and practical advancements. Theoretically, it refines our understanding of help seeking as a situated, interactional phenomenon. Practically, it equips educators with tools to better recognize and support children’s agency in their own learning.

We conducted secondary analyses of transcribed video data based on a larger longitudinal study (TESSI; Lerkkanen & Pakarinen, 2016–2022) conducted in Central Finland that examined the well-being of teachers and students and the quality of teacher–student interactions in Finnish classrooms (Lerkkanen et al., 2023). Twenty-minute segments were filmed in 40 inclusive pre-primary classrooms in spring 2017, involving teachers, teaching assistants, and children about to enter first grade that fall (aged 6–7). Categories of spontaneous student talk – spontaneous comments, question answering, help seeking, and expressions of needs, concerns, or desires – were adapted from Kumpulainen and Wray (1997). As for students’ academic help-seeking behavior, we consider that it necessarily involves a situation of uncertainty or doubt related to the academic learning situation at hand – something that cognitively (and possibly emotionally) destabilizes or disturbs students and needs to be clarified in order for learning to continue. The help-seeking categories were developed based on Zorn and Puustinen (2022) and Gaborit (2023). The following categories were retained: (1) Instrumental help seeking, i.e., requests for explanations concerning the subject matter of a task or parts of it (i.e., the conceptual content). (2) Organizational or practical help seeking, i.e., requests for concrete or material resources or actions related to the purpose or organizational aspects of a task (i.e., the “form”). (3) Executive help seeking, i.e., direct requests for answers. (4) Unspecified requests, which cannot be coded unambiguously. Moreover, based on Gaborit’s (2023) doctoral research, instrumental and organizational or practical help seeking were further divided into two subcategories: exploratory (when the request focuses on something new) and confirmatory (when students seek to check something the teacher has just said or the correctness of their preliminary work or reflection). We also established a list of cases that were not considered academic help seeking in the present data. These included, for example, (1) requests that are not directly related to the academic learning situation at hand, even if they may cognitively disrupt or bother the student (e.g., “Could you please be quiet?”); (2) remarks indicating difficulty with the task at hand but not formulated as requests for help (e.g., “I can’t find anything”, “There weren’t enough tokens for me”); (3) students’ wishes and complaints (e.g., “I want to play that game, too”); and (4) cases in which students solely sought to attract the teacher’s attention (e.g., “Hey, I’m raising my hand”).

Data analysis is ongoing. Preliminary results based on 25% of the data (i.e., integrally transcribed video recordings from ten classrooms, corresponding to 1,090 student speaking turns) indicate that, on average, 42% of student talk consists of spontaneous comments (e.g., expressing personal experiences), 37% involves answering teacher’s questions, 11% reflects academic help seeking, and 10% pertains to expressing needs, concerns, or desires. Considerable variability is observed across classrooms, with help seeking accounting for between 1.7% and 25% of student speaking turns. Preliminary analysis of the identified help-seeking sequences using the new coding scheme further shows that a large majority (75.5%) of pre-primary students’ requests fall into a category that could be termed organizational (cf. Zorn & Puustinen, 2022) or practical – that is, requests for concrete or material resources or actions related to the organizational aspects or purpose of a task, in order to make progress. This category appears as the dominating type of help seeking in pre-primary students’ spontaneous talk. The two categories introduced by Nelson-Le Gall (1981) were thus in the minority: 21% of help-seeking sequences were instrumental, while no executive help seeking was observed. In addition, the results obtained using the new help-seeking coding scheme seem promising, as only 3% of the help-seeking data was classified as unspecified (i.e., requests that could not be coded unambiguously) – a very low score compared to Zorn and Puustinen (2022), who found that one third of the help-seeking data could not be coded unequivocally. The substantial inter-class variability observed in this study (i.e., help seeking accounted for only 1.7% of student speaking turns in one classroom, while it represented 25% in another) invites us to complement our analyses with information on the pedagogical context of the video-recorded lessons and the overall interactional dynamics of the classroom.

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