Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.