First-year students‘ transition to higher education: the role of academic help-seeking with peer students in academic success

First-semester students transitioning to higher education rely on self-regulation skills to promote their learning, their academic success and their perseverance until graduation. One particular skill is academic help-seeking together with peers which allows students to overcome knowledge-related obstacles and fosters understanding of concepts. Academic help-seeking among peers is based on social interaction and hence requires access to social resources. Two specific components of social resources are social embeddedness and group awareness: First, social embeddedness designates having access to close peers that are likely to provide help. Second, cognitive group awareness designates being attentive about peers’ cognitive states, such as considering who is competent enough to provide an explanation for a lecture-related problem. The first article presents a semester-long field study investigating the role of social resources on academic help-seeking as well as academic success measures. The results indicate that both components of social resources improve academic help-seeking. On top of that, group awareness particularly predicts student’s satisfaction and this relationship is mediated via academic help-seeking. Interestingly, it was found that academic help-seeking had a negative effect on student’s satisfaction. The group awareness about peers’ competence within a content-domain may be supported by tools that provide respective cognitive information. Those may enable informed decisions on peers when seeking help. Both articles two and three present two in-field intervention studies in which group awareness information was provided to students in order to support the selection of adequate helpers. The second article develops the theoretical rationale behind the displayed group awareness information of helpers’ availability and competence. Based on that, the third article provides evidence that the two components of social resources develop within different timeframes during the first semester: group awareness is improved by information after the first week, whereas social embeddedness evolves the most in the weeks before the exam. Both studies did not reveal a systematic pattern for students’ selection of helpers based on cognitive group awareness information. Research has shown that (meta-)cognitive learning strategies invoke (meta-)cognitive processes beneficial for learning. Hence, it can be expected that during academic help-seeking the application of strategies conducive to the current learning goal may similarly improve the outcome of help-seeking episodes. Based on this expectation, the fourth article clarifies the competence to make use of social resources, describes the development of a situational judgement test and provides empirical evidence for the quality of differentiation of its subscales. Additionally, a moderating effect of the competence on the association between academic help-seeking and academic success was tested, but could not be confirmed. The development of this test was a fundamental contribution to the present dissertation. Furthermore, this dissertation sheds a light on the digital services students use for academic help-seeking and how they actually seek help. Moreover, traditional help-seeking literature describes reasons why students avoid seeking help. Building on that evidence, it is of interest in how far these reasons hold true for help-seeking with digital services as well as which features are perceived as insufficient and may need to be improved in future support services. Oriented on these goals, the fifth article reports results of semi-structured interviews regarding singular help-seeking episodes using digital services. In the most of the reported episodes help was sought via mobile instant messenger services. Moreover, social humiliation by peer students was the most frequently reported inhibition that prevented students to seek help from peers. Further results are reported. Overall, the present work follows several approaches to provide conceptual discussion as well as empirical evidence on how to support students’ transition to higher education when they are using peer students for academic help-seeking behavior.