Helping students develop a conceptual understanding of physics is a critical goal of physics education. To better understandconceptual learning in physics, we investigated individual differences in students achievement goals, and their relationto learning. Past work suggests that mastery-approach goals predict conceptual learning and transfer, whereas othergoals do not (Belenky & Nokes-Malach, 2013). However, little work has tested this prediction using different types ofphysics learning outcomes. In this study, students completed pre and post achievement goal surveys and received differenttypes of instruction, followed by an extensive learning assessment. As expected, we found that mastery-approach goalswere positively related to conceptual learning outcomes, whereas performance-approach goals were not. Unexpectedly,performance-avoidance goals, while not related to mastery-approach goals, were also predictive of conceptual learningunder some conditions. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of motivation and learning.

A key element of conceptual understanding in physics education is the ability to make qualitative inferences. In this study, we investigated whether people use causal notions when solving simple, qualitative physics problems. We utilized the principles of directionality and holding variables constant to assess participant's accuracy in answering questions about inferences from cause to effect (CE), effect to cause (EC), and from one cause to the other cause (CC). Participants responded with greater accuracy for CE and EC questions when alternative causal information was held constant compared to when it is made explicitly unknown. For CC questions accuracy was lower across all alternative information types. Further, participants generally treated ambiguous alternative causes as if they were held explicitly constant. These results indicate that using notions of causality can potentially help identify difficult qualitative physics questions and be used as a tool in instructional design.

We compared types of transfer facilitated by instructions to engage in analogical comparison or self-explanation. Participants received learning materials and worked examples with prompts supporting analogical comparison, selfexplanation, or instructional explanation study. Learners also self-reported their use of analogical comparison and selfexplanation on a series of questionnaires. We evaluated condition effects on self-reports and transfer, and the relations between self-reports and transfer. Receiving materials with analogical-comparison support and reporting greater levels of analogical comparison were both associated with worse transfer performance, while reporting greater levels of selfexplanation was associated with better performance. Learners’ self-reports of analogical comparison and selfexplanation were not related to condition assignment, suggesting that the questionnaires did not measure the same processes promoted by the intervention, or that individual differences are robust even when learners are instructed to engage in analogical comparison or self-explanation