Mathematical help-seeking: observing how undergraduate students use the Internet to cope with a mathematical task

Abstract

We report on a study focused on identifying how undergraduate students make use of the Internet as a source of help to solve their mathematical queries. In particular, with the help of monitoring software, we observe how a group of engineering students use the Internet to solve a mathematical task related to the concept of definite integral, and we produce a characterization of their help-seeking behaviors. We observed that students manifest instrumental help-seeking behaviors mostly associated with the procedural items of the task (such as solving a definite integral), although there were executive help-seeking manifestations associated with the declarative questions (such as providing definitions). There was a general pattern of behavior manifested by the students who participated in the study; this pattern was dominated by the use of search engines and keywords to identify sources of mathematical help.