What is happening in psychology of learning courses?
Undergraduate learning courses still skip behavior analysis—add labs and active tactics to plug the gap.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Iwata et al. (1990) mailed a short survey to 238 US colleges. They asked one question: what do you teach in your learning course?
The answers showed wild swings in topics. Some courses had zero behavior analysis. Most had no lab work.
What they found
Behavior analysis was barely a footnote in most classes. Professors favored cognitive and physiological topics.
Only a handful of schools required students to run rats or pigeons. The authors warned that future teachers were missing the science of learning.
How this fits with other research
Lyons (1995) took the critique and built a fix. They swapped long lectures for daily quizzes, peer questions, and fluency drills. Grades and student happiness jumped.
Falcomata (2018) looked back across 28 years and saw the same hole. The review again urged programs to teach principles through direct practice, not talk.
Copeland et al. (2025) asked working BCBAs if they felt ready for schools. Most said no. The training gap A et al. spotted in 1990 is still echoing in 2025.
Why it matters
If you teach or supervise, push for lab sections. One hour of hands-on shaping beats three hours of slides. Ask your college partners to add behavior-analytic content to their learning courses. Future RBTs and BCBAs will enter the field already fluent in the basics.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Current practices in the undergraduate Psychology of Learning course were assessed through a survey in which a questionnaire probing the teaching of the course was sent to 238 4-year colleges and universities in the United States. Fifty-four percent of the questionnaires were returned. Learning courses were taught at all but 10 of the schools that responded. The course typically is one of several that can be selected to fulfill requirements for the major in psychology. The course orientation and content varied widely from cognitive to eclectic to behavioral, and laboratory requirements existed in less than half of the courses. The effects of these practices on behavior analysis are considered and several suggestions are made for teaching behavior analysis in the Learning course and elsewhere to undergraduates.
The Behavior analyst, 1990 · doi:10.1007/BF03392529