Intrinsic motivation is usually regarded as a significant determinant of the use 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, but the strategies are 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 this study, the thinking-aloud method was used to analyze the learning strategies of 36 first-year students of education as they learned 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. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table, and 22 references.) (SLD)