The Academic Help-Seeking Characteristics Of Junior High School Students With Learning Disabilities: Its Relation To Self-Esteem And Self-Efficacy

The problems of learning disabilities (LD) have attracted close attention in the field of psychology and education since the 1960s. At present, domestic researchers are more concentrated on the students of primary schools and have paid more attention to their development and rehabilitation of academic skills. However, in recent years, they have concentrated on the mental problems of the LD, and they have basically formed a consensus:LD is the result of negative factors, one of the most important factors is that LD students have a low study motivation and a low self-efficacy, and lack of proper self-confidence.Academic help-seeking is a kind of activities that the students seek their teachers' and classmates'help when they meet learning difficulties in order to solve them. Academic help-seeking has been one of the main research topics in the western researches of education and psychology since 1980s. Foreign scholars have launched some multi-faceted discussions except the LD students of middle schools. On the basis of precious studies, this study attempts to study academic help-seeking of junior high school students from two aspects of self-esteem and self-efficacy, so as to provide reference and guidance with a view to transforming their education.This study recruited 130 junior high LD students and 1062 junior high normal students as a comparison group from four junior high schools, used a questionnaire survey method, and explored the characteristics of the different gender, the different grade, the different junior high schools'LD students in academic help-seeking, self-esteem and self-efficacy, and the relationship between these three aspects.The results are as follows:1. Gender difference:There doesn't have gender differences of self-esteem, self-efficacy and academic help-seeking among the junior high LD students; as for all subjects, they had significantly differences of self-esteem, self-efficacy and academic help-seeking:More specifically, boys were significantly lower than girls on the scales of self-esteem and academic help-seeking.2. Grade difference:There are grade differences of self-efficacy and academic help-seeking among the junior high LD students. More specifically, grade one and grade two were higher than grade three.3. School difference:There are school differences of academic help-seeking among the junior high LD students; as for all subjects, there are school differences of self-esteem, self-efficacy and academic help-seeking.4. There is a significant positive correlation of self-efficacy and academic help-seeking among the junior high LD students, but a significant negative correlation of self-efficacy and self-esteem. There is a significant negative correlation of self-esteem and instrumental help-seeking, but a significant positive correlation of self-esteem and executive help-seeking.