Designing and Testing the Fit of the Academic Help-Seeking Model Based on the Sense of Connectedness to the School, Social-Emotional Competence and Teacher's Communication Styles with the Mediation of Academic Procrastination

The purpose of the present study was to design and test the fit the academic help-seeking model based on the sense of belonging to the school, social-emotional competence, and the teacher's communication styles with the mediation of academic procrastination.

The method of the research was correlational and structural equation analysis. The statistical population consisted of 14,842 fifth and sixth grade students of Arak city in the academic year 2019-2020, and a sample of 501 was selected using cluster random method. The research tools included help-seeking behavior by Ryan and Pintrich (1997), sense of belonging to school by Berw et al. (2004), social-emotional competence by Zhou and Ee (2012), teacher-student interaction atmosphere by Belmont et al. (1992) and Tuckman's procrastination questionnaire (1991). Structural equation analysis method was used for data analysis using SPSS 22 and LISREL8.8 software.

The results showed that the proposed model had a good fit with the data. Based on results, the direct effect of feeling of belonging to the school, social-emotional competence and communication styles was positive and significant on the help-seeking acceptance and negative and significant on the help-seeking avoidance and academic procrastination (p<0.01). The effect of academic procrastination on the help-seeking acceptance and avoidance dimension was significant. Also, academic procrastination had a significant mediating role in the model.

The positive effects of the sense of belonging to the school, social-emotional competence and communication styles have an effective role in reducing academic procrastination and lower procrastination is effective in increasing the help-seeking behavior of students.