Modeling Structural Relationships of Students' Help-seeking based on Self-Determination and Flourishing: The Mediating Role of Academic Participation and Motivational Beliefs

In the present era, the quality and quantity of education play a crucial role in the future perspective of the individual and is one of the efficacious and appropriate learning strategies in help-seeking or seeking academic help from others. The purpose of the present study was to present a structural model of academic help-seeking based on self-determination and flourishing with the mediating role of academic participation and students' motivational beliefs.

The present study is a developmental-correlational study. The statistical population of this study included all-female high school students in Tehran in the 2019-20 academic year, 454 of whom participated in this study by random cluster sampling as the study sample. The participants answered to the Help-Seeking Questionnaire (Ryan and Pentrich 1997), Basic Needs for self-determination (Ilardi, Leon, Kaiser, and Ryan 1993), the Flourishing Scale (Dainer et al, 2008), Academic participation Scale (Shuffle and Becker, 2006), and Motivational Beliefs Questionnaire (Pentrich et al, 1991). After collecting the questionnaires, the extracted data were analyzed by using structural equation modeling.

The results indicated that the proposed model has a good fit with the data. The results showed a significant relationship between self-determination, flourishing, academic participation, and motivational beliefs with help-seeking (P <0.01) and also, the results of the Bootstrap test showed that the indirect effect of self-determination on help-seeking through motivational beliefs is 0.147 and the indirect effect of flourishing on help-seeking through motivational beliefs is 0.139, which is significant at the level of 0.01.

The results indicated that self-determination and flourishing have a direct effect on students' help-seeking. They also have indirect effects on self-determination and flourishing through motivational beliefs that help to promote students' help-seeking behavior.