The Relationship of Educational Help-Seeking with Self-Directed Learning in female high school students: The Mediating Role of Motivational Beliefs

Educational help-seeking serves as a learning strategy for enhancing students’ psychological and motivational abilities. The present research investigates the mediating role of motivational beliefs in relationship to self-directed learning with educational help-seeking in female high school students. The statistical population consisted of female high school students of Tehran, District 18, in the academic year 2021-2022. A number of 256 students were selected by the cluster sampling method who answered Self-Directed Learning - (SDLQ) (Fisher & et al., 2001), Motivational Beliefs - (MSLG) (Pintrich & De Groot 1990), and Educational Help-Seeking (Ryan & Pintrich, 1997) -(HSQ) questionnaires. The data were analyzed by the structural equation modeling method via Spss 22 and Lisrel 8/8 software. An acceptable fit of the data with the modified model was shown by the Fit indicator. The results showed that self-directed learning was able to directly predict educational help-seeking in female students (p<0/01). Indirect self-directed learning indirectly and openly through motivational beliefs was able to predict educational help-seeking in female students. The findings of this study present that self-directed strategies in learning and motivational beliefs can be concluded to be able to play a role in applying help-seeking skills to students. Moreover, paying attention to educational planning with the aim of promoting these strategies in order to comprehend and control learning, make the right decisions facing academic problems and progress students’ learning process is highly significant.