Background and Context. Academic help-seeking is vital to post-secondary computing students’ effective and successful learning. However, most empirical works in this domain study students’ help resource selection and utilization by aggregating the entire student body as a whole. Moreover, existing theoretical frameworks often implicitly assume that whether/how much a student seeks help from a specific resource only depends on context (the type of help needed and the properties of the resources), not the individual student.

Objectives. To address the gap, we seek to investigate individual computing students’ help-seeking approaches by analyzing what help-seeking characteristics are individual-driven (and thus stay consistent for the same student across different course contexts) and what are context-driven.

Method. We analyzed $N=597$ students’ survey responses on their help resource utilization as well as their actual help-seeking records across at least two of $20$ different offerings across $6$ different courses. We examined correlations/associations between individual students’ frequency-based help usage metrics, type-of-help requested in office/consulting hours, self-reported order of ideal help resource usage, and their collaboration inclination in small lab/discussion sections.

Findings. We found that students’ frequency-based help metrics and their order of ideal help resource usage stays consistent across different course contexts, and thus may be treated as part of students’ individual help-seeking approaches. On the other hand, the type of help students seek in office/consulting hours and how much they collaborate with peers in small sections do not stay consistent across different contexts and thus might be deemed more context-driven than individual-driven.

Implications. Our findings reveal that part of students’ help-seeking characteristics is individual-driven. This opens up a possibility for institutions to track students’ help-seeking records in early/introductory courses, so that some preliminary understanding of students can be acquired before they enter downstream courses. Our insights may also help instructors identify which part of students’ help-seeking behavior are more likely to be influenced by their course context and design.