Connecting Computing Students’ External Help Resource Preferences and Internal Help Resource Usage: 2021-2025
Background and Context. Academic help-seeking from both internal (course-affiliated) and external resources is a key part of computing students’ learning. The recent emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) tools has substantially transformed students’ help-seeking, but our understanding of this impact remains limited. Objectives. We seek to understand the collective changes in computing students’ (1) preferences of using external help resources and (2) usage of internal help resources, and the relationship between these two kinds of metrics at the individual level. We also seek to examine whether the relationship is subject to context influences. Method. We analyzed students’ self-reported preferences for external resources and recorded usage of two internal resources in 26 offerings of four computing courses (N = 3, 921 total enrollments) at our institution over a timespan of eight 15-week terms. Findings. We find increases in students’ preferences for external resources and decreases in their usage of internal resources in some but not all courses. We identify a substantial negative relationship between the two kinds of metrics at the individual level, but its strength depends on help resource and instructional context.
