The course for which K&S was written

Abstract

At Columbia College in the late 1940s, Fred Keller and Nat Schoenfeld established an undergraduate psychology curriculum based on B. F. Skinner’s innovative research, later to be called behavior analysis. The textbook they wrote to accompany their introductory course for that curriculum, “Principles of Psychology,” was published in 1950. The course included a rat laboratory in the Fall semester and a human laboratory in the Spring semester. Based on the PSYC 1-2 manual from the 1954-1955 academic year, this paper describes the course as it was offered at the time and considers some of the features that keep Keller and Schoenfeld’s teachings viable to the present day.