The student-supplied responses and interviews in the present study provide ample information about gravity
conceptions in the natural language of students. While information about where these conceptions come from
and exactly how students’ mental models are structured and used is still in the speculative stage, the project is
ongoing and will be developed further in future work. As mentioned earlier, categories that represent misconceptions
will be used for distractor choices in an up-and-coming, multiple-choice Newtonian Gravity Concept
Inventory (NGCI), which has the potential to provide an independent measure of the mental models presented
in Sections 6 and 7. Student interviews will continue to be used to supplement the NGCI results with a qualitative
approach in an effort to provide a holistic picture of introductory astronomy student understanding of
gravity.