Ryan and colleagues (1998) conducted a study to examine whether sixthgrade students' tendency to avoid seeking help in the classroom was related to student and classroom characteristics. The participants were 516 students from 63 different math classrooms. In describing their results, the researchers noted: "We used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to examine our research questions. . . . Our questions were hierarchical, in that we were interested in both student-level characteristics and classroom-level characteristics that were related to avoidance of help seeking". One of the student-level characteristics that the researchers examined was academic self-efficacy, which refers to students' beliefs about their ability to complete their schoolwork successfully. One of the classroom-level characteristics examined was teachers' ratings of their role in students' social and emotional well-being. The researchers summarized the results of their study as follows: "This study extended previous examinations of help seeking by including individual- and classroom-level predictors. By using multilevel analysis techniques, we found that avoidance of help seeking is related to both individual characteristics of students and characteristics of the classroom".
Explain these results to someone who is familiar with regression (prediction), but has not heard of multilevel modeling.