Help-seeking is a central self-regulated learning strategy that helps students overcome diverse challenges, and it is important to broaden research to examine how beliefs about the external world shape students' help-seeking behaviours. This research tested whether the worldview of social complexity promotes academic help-seeking through dialectical thinking, and whether the impact of dialectical thinking on academic help-seeking is strengthened by reward for application.


Using a quantitative design, Study 1 (N = 140) assessed self-reported help-seeking tendencies, and Study 2 (N = 125) focused on actual online help-seeking digital footprints in the learning management system. Across both studies, social complexity was positively associated with dialectical thinking, and dialectical thinking predicted greater academic help-seeking. Reward for application significantly moderated the relationship between dialectical thinking and help-seeking, such that the indirect effect of social complexity on help-seeking via dialectical thinking was stronger at higher levels of reward for application.


Findings were replicated across self-reported tendencies and observed LMS behaviours, extending self-regulated learning theory by linking distal worldview beliefs to help-seeking via cognitive style, and demonstrating the utility of learning analytics for triangulating self-report. The findings inform educators, cognitive and social psychologists, and learning scientists, and imply targeted classroom interventions to cultivate multicausal reasoning and perspective-taking alongside redesigned learning environments that explicitly link student effort to observable rewards to foster adaptive help-seeking, thus providing policymakers with scalable behavioural measures and practical intervention levers within classroom and learning system contexts.