Final Post

Overview of Learning and Behavior:

At first glance through our text book I thought I knew and was familiar with most concept titles in our book. I was not aware of the depth, extensiveness, and breakdown of each concept. After the first couple chapters, I discovered this, and was really glad that this class went over the specifics of behavioral psych concepts such as operant and classical conditioning.

When you first learn of conditioning it can be hard to grasp. Usually, in Psych 101 you are made to learn the vocabulary, memorize definitions and repeat. However in this class the breakdown of each part of the conditioning process helped me to fully understand conditioning and vocab. such as the US, CS, UCS, CR, Extinction, Stimulus discrimination, ect. After learning the major concepts of conditioning most everything else in the course grew off of the vocab and workings of conditioning.

My Favorite Part:

One of my favorite things I learned and was most interested in in the course was Social Learning Theory. Bandura's Social Learning theory states that people learn from one another via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has connections between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it invloves attention, memory, and motivation.

I believe this theory is especially relevant when raising children. Children want to mimic and be just like their parents. They can not tell right from wrong yet, so they look to their parents to set the example. This seems easy enough, but we all know this is not the case since every parent unfortunatley does not act responsilbly. I attached a video clip that depicts social learning theory well and I feel everyone can relate to their own lives.

**This video is harsh, but shows what growing children can observe from their parents**

"Most human beavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on latr occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action" -Bandura

Extension

Learning and Behavior taught me a lot about how and why people learn and do things. I think this is extremely important to me because I would like to continue to get my teaching certificate after I earn my psych degree. Discovering, in depth, how people learn is going to help me when I go to write lesson plans or come across students that need extra help. Having these go to learning techniques I will be able to evaluate the learning process to the best of my ability. Learning is everywhere from simple school learning to social learning theory humans are continuously learning. Learning and behavior is a pertinent class to understand the human race.