In the beginning.
A single course outline once launched a career; today we can scale that same spark worldwide.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author tells a short, first-person story.
He recalls stumbling into behavior analysis through a 1945 mimeographed course outline handed out by Fred Keller at Columbia.
The piece is a historical note, not an experiment.
What they found
A simple paper syllabus can spark a lifelong career.
The author credits that single document with launching his path in the field.
How this fits with other research
Rehfeldt et al. (2016) extends this idea into the digital age. They built behavior analysis’ first MOOC, turning one classroom handout into free, worldwide training.
Lattal (2022) gives you a ready-made teaching kit. His six-part framework turns the same early literature that hooked the 1988 author into organized lessons for today’s students.
Frieder et al. (2018) survey modern faculty to list the exact readings now viewed as “must-have” for undergraduates, moving from one person’s lucky find to a shared national syllabus.
Together these papers show a straight line: one mimeo → global online course → structured lesson plans → consensus reading lists.
Why it matters
Your syllabus is more than paper or pixels. It can be the doorway into the field for the next BCBA. Use the modern tools—MOOC segments, Lattal’s six-element history plan, and the Frieder core-reading list—to make that door wider and clearer for every student you meet.
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Join Free →Pick one classic article from the Frieder list, add a short history note from Lattal’s framework, and open your next training session with the story of how it all began.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
I stumbled across systematic psychology almost by accident. I had entered the graduate program at Columbia, intending to specialize in social and clinical psychology. But to make ends meet (and master some of the funda- mentals more securely while doing so), I had accepted a stipend of $37.50 per month to serve as the "reader" in the introductory course for male undergraduates (Columbia College). The first two semesters were fairly uneventful intellectually, but in the spring of 1945 Fred S. Keller returned from his Morse Code research with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and resumed his teaching duties, which included that course. When he handed out a mim- eographed outline that proposed a "consid- eration [of] principles derived from the analysis of human and animal behavior by the ex- perimental method," I realized that something was up. Soon he was into such esoteric matters as the static laws of the reflex, Type S and Type R conditioning, extinction, generalization, stimulus discrimination, response dif- ferentiation, chaining, and their application to verbal behavior and thinking.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1988 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1988.50-287