Classical Conditioning In College

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Previous research has suggested that, at least half of all students who drop out of college do so during their first year in college (Noel, 1985; Terenzini, 1986).According to Blanc, Debuhr, and Martin (1983) many of these students leave during the first six to eight weeks of their first semester and approximately one third of first-year students fail to enrol for their second year due to difficulties with the transition to college (Upcraft, 1995). These statistics have remained unchanged in recent years. This would indicate that even though these students had the academic ability to gain entry to third level education something is preventing them from being able to continue their studies. Furthermore, this would suggest that learning in college…show more content…
Pavlov (1902) showed how classical conditioning can be used to make a dog salivate to the sound of a bell. Pavlov states that people can be trained to perform a certain task or response by providing a trigger which may be a sound picture or phrase. There a number of different ways that you can put this theory into practice in college. For instance, if you always do your assignment work or study in the college library your brain will then start to associate study and assignment work with the library. By completing your college work in this kind of environment you will get your mind into this mental state each time you go there making into easier and quicker everytime. Another theory that students could use would be the theory of Operant Conditioning is a theory developed by B.F Skinner (1938).This theory states that rewarding the a desired behaviour will become more frequent. In order to introduce this theory into your study routine, you may reward yourself with 10 minutes looking through social media for every hour studying during…show more content…
The results of this survey revealed that the main sources of stress for two thirds of the college students was demands from college studies. Stress has a huge impact on how we learn, research found ( 2008), when cortisol reaches the hippocampus, the brain’s primary structure for associating information from short term into long term memory, the structure’s dendritic spines disintegrate rapidly. When dendritic spines degrade, the brain’s ability to identify and store important information is significantly inhibited. As stress will probably affect you at certain points throughout college it is important to figure out how to overcome it. In order to overcome this stress and anxiety, it could be beneficial to look into the Coaching psychology technique of Self-talk. Hardy et al. (2005) states that “Positive self talk predominates in more effective performances, while negative thoughts more frequently accompany poorer performances”. When you feel under stress positive self talk should help relieve stress and also help you to gain more motivation to learn. These tips were designed to help you to apply Psychology learn theories to your own learning. The main points are in red for you to be able to remember clearer and to be easily able to find

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