Support in Education

Chrysta Pelissier

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119777311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Metodi di insegnamento

This book aims to reflect the contours of the notion of aid as it is questioned by current scientific research. This notion appears as fuzzy in its scope of intervention, in its methods of multidisciplinary and multi-referential approaches in theoretical frameworks convened. Present in different areas that we propose to investigate in the book (training and teaching at university, inclusion in education, but also prevention, the fight against failure in orientation), the notion of help questions research in SHS and Computer Science. It comes in different formats labeled "help" but also "support", "support" or "guidance". In order to take stock of these notions and to question their differences, we convoke several authors (French and foreign) who participate by their research (-action) underlining components and environmental factors of the device that give this notion any its thickness.

PART 1
Theoretical Approaches

1
The Concept of Assistance

1.1. Introduction

The concept of assistance is a subject that presents different facets depending on whether one is on the side of the student, the teacher or the educational institution. The first is at the heart of the pedagogical relationship between teacher and student. In daily classroom interactions, it refers to the student’s request for assistance, which is often referred to in English as “help seeking”. The second refers to the adaptations made by teachers to adapt their teaching to the characteristics of their students, and, in particular, to enable the weakest students to make progress. The term “assistance” then refers to the differentiation of the objectives, forms and content of the assistance provided (methodological, disciplinary, transversal), whether produced by the teachers themselves or by other actors (resources found on the Internet, for example). In this context, the assistance refers more generally to the concept of scaffolding¹. In English-speaking countries more specifically, this is a question of adaptation or differentiation according to the target students and the directions chosen by the teacher. The third facet of the assistance more specifically concerns pupils with difficulties, to whom the institution offers various assistance mechanisms. This is the remediation aspect of the English-speaking world’s programs and interventions.

Concerning the request for assistance, a request launched on the ERIC² search engine returns 99 peer-reviewed articles containing the keyword “help seeking”. Reading the abstracts allowed us to remove articles that were far removed from our theme of assistance in an educational context, particularly those related to health. Two groups were then differentiated: the first refers to 44 articles on requesting assistance in primary and secondary classrooms, and the second refers to an older audience (high school students, students, student teachers and new teachers). The content of the first corpus of articles, which we are particularly interested in this chapter, relates largely to the English-speaking world. Its analysis was completed by the contents presented in a French-language handbook on this topic (Puustinen 2013).

With respect to classroom support practices in primary and secondary schools, it is the work of French researchers that has provided us with the most fruitful avenues for reflection; we have therefore made use of research on pedagogical differentiation (Piquée 2010; Goigoux 2016), the work of the CIRCEFT-ESCOL³ team and the RESEIDA network⁴ (Bautier 2005; Rochex and Crinon 2011), particularly on the issues of leveling down induced by differentiation. Finally, we identified the results of the “beginning reading and writing. Study on the influence of teaching practices on quality of basic learning” (Goigoux 2016; Piquée and Viriot-Goeldel 2016).

As for experienced and evaluated intervention programs around the world, their very large number – the government “What Works Clearinghouse?” database lists 581 that have been evaluated in the United States – has forced us to restrict our literature review to reading and writing assistance in primary schooling. We conducted a search in the ERIC database limited to meta-analyses with the keywords “meta-analysis” and “reading intervention” and selected the “peer-reviewed scientific journals” option. A total of 88 articles were selected by the database, mainly meta-analyses, and also some literature reviews (review, synthesis, best evidence synthesis). The reading of the abstracts was then used to refine this selection. All 21 articles selected belong, in fact, to the English-language literature, which reflects the state of the strengths in the subject area. In order to take into account the linguistic and contextual specificities of this teaching in French schools, we also examined the studies “beginning reading and writing” (Goigoux 2016) and “reading assessment” (Gentaz et al. 2013) and the “Evalire” experiment (Leclercq et al. 2015, 2016) as well as two other experiments recently conducted in France (Bianco et al. 2012; Ecalle et al. 2019).

The corpus thus compiled reflects the state of French and English-language literature on the concept of assistance. On the basis of this work, three aspects of the concept of assistance will be examined: requests for assistance, assistance practices within regular classes and means of providing additional assistance.

1.2. The request for assistance

The request for assistance can be defined as a verbal interaction at the student’s initiative, the purpose of which is to enable the student to progress in his or her learning. Long considered to be the preserve of weak and less independent students, its key role in the learning process was gradually highlighted by the pioneering work of Nelson-Le Gall (Nelson-Le Gall 1981, 1985) in the 1980s. As a result of this work, several models of the application process have been proposed (see, for example, (Nelson-Le Gall 1981; Newman 2000)), including the metacognitive processes of identifying a problem, recognizing a need for assistance, examining the potential objectives, costs and benefits of the application (or lack of application for assistance), choosing the expert to be sought and obtaining assistance, using it and evaluating the process. The number of processes involved reflects the complexity of an approach that involves both cognitive and socio-cognitive aspects.

1.2.1. A self-regulated process

One of the challenges when thinking about the request for assistance is to identify its function in order to distinguish a request requiring excessive dependence on the teacher from the one that puts the learner on the path to autonomy. Nelson-Le Gall (Nelson-Le Gall 1981, 1985 ) thus distinguishes between the request for “executive” assistance, by which the student aims to have his or her task performed by others, and the “instrumental” request, which ultimately aims to understand the task and perform it independently. It is this latter form of request that is referred to as a “self-regulated learning strategy”, each step of which can be characterized by self-regulatory indicators (Puustinen 2013). The concept of adaptive help seeking refers to this type of self-regulated request for assistance that contributes to increasing cognitive autonomy and facilitating independent learning (Newman 2000, 2002).

1.2.2. A socio-cognitive process

While the request for assistance requires a high level of control and regulation of various cognitive and metacognitive abilities, it is also a social and socio-cognitive process. Current research increasingly focuses on the social interactions of the request for assistance (Karabenick and Newman 2009). A student’s ability to solicit an expert thus depends largely on his or her parental socialization (Newman 2000; Stright et al. 2001; Calarco 2011), which is a predictor of the request for assistance. In addition, teachers themselves, the relationship they have with their students and the classroom climate they build are likely to facilitate or hinder these interactions. Several studies aim to identify the influence of the classroom climate, or the status of students (popular, average, rejected) on the request for assistance, particularly in the solicitation of peer experts (Nelson -Le Gall 2006; Shim et al. 2013). Analyzing the interactions between students who seek assistance and those who provide it in group work find that their corpus illustrates Vygotskian and Piagetian’s theories on the role of socio-cognitive interactions in learning (Weeb and Mastergeorge 2003). Focusing on collaborative learning theories, work on requesting assistance from peers in student groups or tutoring arrangements is another well-documented area of research on requests for assistance.

It also appears that the request for assistance has a social dimension. Indeed, a sociological study comparing the requests for assistance from students from contrasting social backgrounds found that the social affiliation of students strongly influences their request for assistance in class (Calarco 2011). As a result, pupils from the middle class ask their teachers for more help than their classmates from the working class. Rather than waiting for help, they contact the teacher directly, sometimes even interrupting him or her, to make their request. This gives them more help, less time to wait and a better ability to perform the academic tasks they are asked to do. By implementing the skills and strategies of the request for assistance in this way, they gain an advantage. This helps to reinforce social inequalities within the same classroom.

1.2.3. Obstacles and adjuvants to the request for assistance

Another challenge of the work in this area is identifying the characteristics of students seeking help, let alone those of students who avoid taking this approach. In general, the avoidance of requesting assistance is linked to both individual student characteristics and class characteristics. As expected, students who avoid asking for help are more anxious, have a poorer academic performance and/or a poorer perception of their academic eff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• PART 1: Theoretical Approaches
• PART 2: Specific Assistance Needs for Particular Situations
• PART 3: Tools to Support the Transformation of Teaching Practices
• PART 4: Types of Assistance in a Pedagogical Context
• Conclusion
• List of Authors
• Index
• Other titles from ISTE in Innovations in Learning Sciences
• End User License Agreement