ABSTRACT
If you know nothing about the branch of psychology called learning, you may have some misconceptions about the scope of this field. I can recall browsing through the course catalog as a college freshman and coming across a course offered by the Department of Psychology with the succinct title “Learning.” Without bothering to read the course description, I wondered about the contents of this course. Learning, I reasoned, is primarily the occupation of students. Would this course teach students better study habits, better reading, and better note-taking skills? Or did the course examine learning in children, covering such topics as the best ways to teach a child to read, to write, to do arithmetic? Did it deal with children
who have learning disabilities? It was difficult to imagine spending an entire semester on these topics, which sounded fairly narrow and specialized for an introductory-level course.
