Universities admit increasingly diverse student cohorts with varying academic entry standards. To address students' varying academic prerequisites, academic support servicessuch as literacy and numeracy supportare offered to ensure student success. However, students often do not engage. Aimed at mapping variables related to a student's decision to seek academic help in order to identify gaps, this systematic scoping review informs future research and supports the provision of academic support services for diverse student cohorts. As recent research does not provide sufficient evidence, the areas of psychological, physiological and help-seeking in career counselling were included. Informed by the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), database and reference list searches were conducted for age, gender, nationality and cultural background, acculturation, stigma, socioeconomic status, educational background, help-seeking experience, perceived behavioural control, attitudes, locus of control, personality and subjective norms, and 168 primary research studies were included in the review. Studies were selected based on their publication year, and the context and the variables examined. Information from the studies was systematically entered into a database and organised. Findings show that gender, stigma, help-seeking experience, attitudes and subjective norms are crucial for help-seeking in general. More specifically, gender, age, cultural background and personality seem to be related to academic help-seeking and should therefore be considered when evaluating or designing academic support services. Although other variables were examined in some studies, no trends could be identified for these due to ambivalent results, indicating that the variables related to academic help-seeking may depend on the context. This review also revealed that there are gaps that should be addressed in future research concerning academic help-seeking behaviour, while at the same time, if possible, including all variables identified in this review.

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As attrition rates of Australian undergraduate distance programs are consistently high, this article investigates whether retention can be increased by increasing the students' satisfaction through improving the student experience. This project examines the distance student experience informed by students' satisfaction with already identified crucial program factors. The authors propose that the Experience Economy model, utilised in tourism studies and general economics, is also relevant to education. An online survey collected data from 75 undergraduate distance students. Gathered data was analysed using two simple mediation models. The distance student experience and the students' satisfaction with crucial program factors were strongly indirectly related to the students' intention to persist through the students' overall satisfaction. The results indicate that designers of tertiary distance courses should consider program factors and the characteristics of the distance student experience to ensure high levels of student satisfaction and to increase the students' intention to persist.

Academic support at Australian universities has become an important aspect of higher education, as student cohorts continue to diversify, and universities need to ensure the students’ success and the institutions’ reputations. Often, students in need do not access academic support services and little is known about what influences students’ decisions to seek academic support. This small-scale qualitative study aims to clarify why students (do not) engage in support and what could be changed to make services more accessible and engaging. Semi-structured interviews revealed that the promotion of services needs to be improved and public stigma about seeking academic help should be addressed to normalise accessing academic support services at university. A high standard of ease of use and the opportunity to participate in support in various modes (e.g. online, face-to-face, peer learning, individual learning) contribute to the helpfulness and the overall positive perception of academic support services.

Universities admit and enrol increasingly diverse student cohorts with varying academic entry standards. To increase student success, universities offer academic support to students, however, often students do not engage in or access this academic support. Building on the Theory of Planned Behavior and a comprehensive literature review, this study aims to identify personality variables, background variables and variables related to the Theory of Planned Behavior that can predict academic help seeking in higher education to inform the design of engaging and accessible academic support. Quantitative data were collected via an online survey across a range of different disciplines and undergraduate year levels at an Australian university. Structural Equation Modelling revealed that public stigma, self-stigma, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, gender and the Theory of Planned Behavior variables perceived behavioural control, subjective norm and attitude towards help seeking play a role in predicting intentions to seek academic help, and academic help-seeking behaviour. Findings indicate that 20% of the variance of help-seeking intentions but only 5.7% of the variance of academic help seeking could be explained. Findings are discussed as to how they can inform interventions to increase help-seeking intentions and behaviour. Finally, this study explores how to overcome the present intention-behaviour gap.