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PSY 337LearningFall 2003
Office Hours: TBD
ObjectivesCourse ObjectivesWhat is learning? How do we learn? How is it different from that other course we teach here called Cognition? These are the topics of this course. Briefly learning is the acquisition of new behaviors as a results of learning. This course will examine these foundational ideas of psychology and some of the many controversies surrounding our understanding of what our knowledge about how learning happens for what is means to be human or any other animal. Much of the material in this course is grounded in the behaviorist tradition so we will seriously encounter several behaviorist theorists, but we will also encounter some important critics. This grounding of a set of findings in a tradition that makes many of us uncomfortable in its implications will give us a good opportunity to examine the nature of theory and the relationship between theory and data in great detail. Major ObjectivesThis course is an upper level course and an upper level lab course. Thus, in this course there are several specific objectives that relate to its position in the major. As you advance, we hope to give you more ownership over your education, thus at about the middle of the course you will give a presentation where you will lead a discussion on a research paper you will assign to the class. I hope in this assignment to give you more experience reading primary literature and also give you some experience doing literature research and being able to interpret a research article in the context of other knowledge. In addition, you should be making progress towards being an independent learner. Thus, you will have an independent lab research project. At the end of this course, along with the other advanced and basic courses you take, it is hoped that you are ready for your senior project. Liberal Arts ObjectivesThis course also resides in Hanover College. When you graduate you will be given a degree, the Bachelor of Arts. Your degree is identical to every other student that graduates. You do not get a degree in Psychology. You only get a major in Psychology. The difference is that we believe, or at least hope, that all students leaving this school have attained something that is common to all students. We hope you are educated, at least to a degree. Towards that end, all courses need to help develop skills needed by an educated person. These include analytical thinking, evaluation of evidence, development of new ideas, the evaluation of ideas (our own and others) and the articulate dissemination of our learning. These skills are crucial to all facets of your life, your career included. Thus, this course will require discussion of the material in the class, oral presentations, independent research, and writing. Class Schedule
Lab Schedule
Assignments and ExamsExams Exams are all essay and comprehensive. They will ask you to critically examine the issues discussed to that point in the course and to draw from multiple areas to reach a conclusion. I am debating whether the exams should be open book or not. Perhaps, we will have a class discussion on the topic. Mid-Term Project Starting with the 7th week of the course, you will be doing individual presentations. Part of the presentation will be an over view of your proposed final project. The other part will be a discussion of one or two recent (last 10 years) journal article relating to the topics of operant or classical conditioning. You will find the article, put it on reserve or in a place to make copies, assign it to the class and lead a discussion on it. To be able to lead a discussion on any topic requires that you know some of the background. So be prepared to do some extra library research to understand and present a background to the class so that they can understand the importance of the paper. So the grading will be on the relevance of the paper, the quality of the background material (i.e., does it aid in understanding or is it irrelevant or insufficient), the quality of the discussion that you lead. Depending upon the class size, we might move the final project presentations to the lab time. Possible topics: Operant conditioning and Cocaine, Token Economy, Operant Conditioning and Autism, Systematic Desensitization, Opponent Process Theory of Emotional Reactions, Habituation/Dishabituation as a research method in Infants, Classical Conditioning and Food Preferences, Classical Conditioning and Advertising or Marketing, Operant Conditioning and Classroom Behavior, Operant Conditioning and Language. Ok, you know our library. It often does not have an article you want. So jump on this so you can ILL. Before you decide on a paper to present, you will need to present it to me and get it approved. I am unlikely to be able to do that definitively from an abstract. So ILL a few so you are more likely to get one that will work. You will not be able to schedule a time to present until you have an approved article. Lab Write Ups The lab reports will be in an APA format including all sections. You are expected, since you have had research methods, to be familiar with APA format. What you have forgotten you can look up in books in the library. Final Lab Project Lets have some fun here. Well I hope a lot of the course will be fun, but this should be a lot of fun. Conditioning principles are the basis for the tricks that you see at Sea World and lots of animal shows. In this class, take what you have done, and use conditioning principles to teach the animal to perform some trick. You will demonstrate your animals success or lack of it on the last lab. You will also do a poster illustrating how you when about your conditioning. You will also write a formal paper where you will discuss your approach, the principles you used, discuss your history of your work, and make conclusions about how you successfully or not used conditioning principles. (This is still written in APA format). Ok, let me give some ideas off the top of my head as I have never done this before. 1) teach a rat to run a maze without error or prevarication. 2) teach the rat to move a ball through a maze. 3) teach the rat to hit various objects in a certain order. 4) create an obstacle course for the rat. 4) Have it stand on its haunches and play dead under your control. Be creative. Criteria will be complexity of behavior, reliability of the rat following the command, as well as details in the presentation and write up.
Grading
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