Intrinsic Motivation, Self-Explanations, and Transfer.

Intrinsic motivation is usually regarded as significant determinant of the employment of elaborative and metacognitive learning strategies that, in turn, foster the acquisition of well-structured and transferable knowledge. In studies testing this assumption the following pattern of results is usually obtained: Intrinsic motivation is significantly related to elaborative and metacognitive strategies; the strategies are, however, only marginally related to learning outcomes. This pattern of results may be due to the fact that learning strategies are usually measured rather indirectly by self-report questionnaires. In the present study, the thinking-aloud method was used to analyze the learning strategies of 36 first-year students of education while learning probability calculation from worked-out examples. Learning strategies in the context of learning from examples are usually called self-explanations. In contrast to studies assessing learning strategies by questionnaires, substantial correlations between self-explanations and transfer of the acquired skills were found. In addition, intrinsic motivation was related to self-explanations. However, intrinsic motivation does not seem to have favorable effects on all kinds of elaborative and metacognitive strategies. Furthermore, the relations between intrinsic motivation and self-explanations seem to vary between subgroups of learners.