Strategies of Academic Help-seeking on the Internet: The Example of Russian Students

Our work is devoted to the development and validation of the scale to measure academic help-seeking on the Internet. Researchers distinguish two modes of academic help-seeking: instrumental and executive. The first one is associated with seeking explanations and additional knowledge that would allow to master the task, while the second – with seeking ready-made answers. Students using different strategies differ in their attitudes towards schooling and academic achievement. For comparison we developed and validated a complementary scale of academic help-seeking from peers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to assess the grouping of different internet resources. Additionally, structural equation modelling was done to assess the validity of the scales by including anti-school attitudes and GPA variables. Although there is a clear division into two groups of internet resources that can be related to instrumental and executive strategies, the developed scales have low validity resulting in poor model fit. Nevertheless, this research provides a basis for the further development of the instrument for measuring academic help-seeking on the Internet in the Russian context, highlights important limitations of such work and provides suggestions for future research.