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01:830:311 · Psychology · School 01 — New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences
Learning Processes is an upper-level Rutgers psychology course on how behavior changes with experience, moving from stimulus-response foundations through associative and instrumental learning, motivation, extinction, aversive learning, memory, and the neural processes that support behavior.
How hard?
Students rate teaching
SIRS · 1,949 responses · 2014–2025
Spring 2027
2 open in snapshot · 1 instructor
When it meets
Livingston
Checked-in sections · current seat counts are unavailable.
AI-generated overview
Higher means more demanding · AI summary
5 units · topic sequence may vary by instructor
The posted syllabus opens by framing the course as a science of behavior and of the neural processes behind behavior. Early material establishes how psychologists measure behavior, read graphs, and think about learning as change produced by experience rather than as a loose collection of everyday examples.
The first run of weekly topics centers on the relationship between a stimulus and a response, then asks how repeated experience changes that relationship. This is the part of the course where habituation, sensitization, and associative rules become concrete rather than just vocabulary words.
After the first exam, the syllabus shifts into instrumental learning: how consequences shape voluntary behavior. Students usually have to move from identifying a process to reasoning through how reinforcement schedules change pace, persistence, and response patterns.
The middle-late portion of the semester asks what energizes a behavior and what signals when that behavior is appropriate. The syllabus pairs motivational mechanisms with the role of stimuli as cues, so the course starts feeling less like isolated experiments and more like a system for explaining organized behavior.
The final weeks turn to what happens when old responses compete, weaken, or must be withheld, and then to how learned information is recalled. That makes the course end with a broader picture: learning is not only about acquiring behavior, but also about suppressing, updating, and retrieving it.
Public Rutgers discussion tends to describe Learning Processes as manageable but not effortless: students often say the first exam can be a wake-up call because the class asks for application of concepts, not just term memorization, and that performance improves once lecture notes are turned into examples and practice scenarios.
The course is built around the idea that learning is not just temporary performance or verbal knowledge; it is a change in how an organism responds after interacting with its environment.
Habituation, sensitization, and conditioning look different on the surface, but the class treats them as lawful processes that can be studied experimentally and compared across settings.
Instrumental learning pushes students to explain behavior in terms of reinforcement history, incentives, and schedules instead of only immediate intention.
Extinction, aversive learning, and memory remind you that the psychology of learning also studies when behaviors weaken, compete, or get retrieved under new conditions.
Common pitfall
Instead
For each process, be able to invent a simple scenario, identify the stimulus and response, and explain why that example fits better than nearby concepts.
Common pitfall
Instead
Pause to ask whether the behavior is being elicited by a predictive cue or selected because consequences made it more likely.
Common pitfall
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Use notes as support, not as a substitute for understanding, because the harder questions still depend on applying principles quickly and accurately.
Common pitfall
Instead
Practice reading what changed, what stayed constant, and what comparison actually supports the claim being made.
2 open · Livingston
| Section | Status | Instructor | Meeting | Campus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0116532 | Open | Albin-Brooks | Tuesday 12:10 PM-1:30 PM at TIL 254; Friday 12:10 PM-1:30 PM at TIL 254TIL 254 | Livingston |
| 0216533 | Open | Albin-Brooks | Tuesday 10:20 AM-11:40 AM at TIL 232; Friday 10:20 AM-11:40 AM at TIL 232TIL 232 | Livingston |
Historical student surveys
Teaching
3.90
Course quality
3.86
Response rate
39.6%
Coverage
41 offerings · 2014–2025
| Instructor | Offerings | Teaching | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Louis Matzel | 8 | 3.89 | 3.84 |
| Arthur Tomie | 6 | 3.77 | 3.87 |
| Christopher Albin-Brooks | 4 | 4.55 | 4.45 |
| Tomie A. | 4 | 3.43 | 3.38 |
| Joshua Cohen | 3 | 4.27 | 4.27 |
| Tomie Arthur | 3 | 3.20 | 3.13 |
Catalog and planning context
Credits
3
Current campuses
Livingston
Current availability
2 open of 2
Catalog terms
Fall, Spring, Summer
Core codes
SOEHS
Loaded terms
6
((21:830:101 and 21:830:102) or (01:830:101))<em> OR </em> ((21:830:101 and 21:830:102) or (50:830:101))
No direct degree-list membership appears in the checked-in requirement index.