Background. Academic help-seeking is a key metacognitive strategy that benefits post-secondary computing students’ learning. Although recent works revealed rich relationships between students’ characteristics and their help-seeking, most focus on a single type of help resource, a single computing context, and/or a single characteristic at a time.

Objectives. We seek to study the relationships between student characteristics and their behavior in course-affiliated (internal) help resources as well as their approaches in help resource selection/utilization. We then study whether any relationships are specific to a help resource or a course context, and whether they persist when other related characteristics are controlled.

Method. We analyzed (1) students’ help-seeking behavioral records in course-affiliated help resources from 40 offerings of eight courses across two institutions over 3.5 years, and (2) students’ self-reported help-seeking approaches in their preferred order of help resource usage from 18 of these offerings.

Findings. On students’ behavior, we found students belonging to the gender minority and students who felt less confident coming into a course sought help from internal resources more than their peers. On students’ approaches, we found students belonging to the gender minority preferred using course-affiliated resources over external resources, and vice versa for students belonging to the gender majority. We found Latinx/e/a/o and non-CS major students relied on people outside of the course more than their peers, and first-year students prioritized course-affiliated resources less than their peers. We found the relationship between students’ confidence and their help-seeking behavior is specific to office hours, and that both gender and confidence remain significantly related to students’ usage of office hours when the other variable is controlled.

Implications. Our results deepen the understanding of students’ use of common internal help resources and reveal relationships between student characteristics and their intent to use external resources. These insights inform computing educators’ help landscape design, resource allocation, and teaching staff training.