Psychology Scholarship Application

The Department of Behavioral and Health Sciences offers a psychology scholarship each year to a freshman or transfer student who begins studies at Baker in the fall.

Be sure to contact the Office of Financial Aid at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 785.594.4595 to ensure you have applied for all possible sources of assistance.

Priority will be given to applications received before March 1.

Qualifications

To be considered for a departmental scholarship, you must meet the two following criteria:

• Minimum high school GPA of 3.5
• Minimum composite score of 25 on the ACT

If you qualify, please submit a scholarship application.

If you receive a departmental scholarship, you will be required to take a psychology course in each of your first two semesters.

Teacher Recommendation

In addition to the application, students should also ask a teacher to complete a teacher recommendation form found at the following link: www.bakerU.edu/psychologyrecommendation.

Essay Question

You must also answer and submit an essay question. Instructions for the essay question are listed after the application.

Scholarship Application

First name*:

 

Middle name:

 

Last name*:

 

Address*:

 

City:

 

State:

 

ZIP:

 

Telephone*:

 

What type of phone is this*? Choose Option Home phone Cell phone

 

Student's email*:

 

GPA:

 

ACT score:

 

ACT English score:

 

ACT math score:

 

ACT science score:

 

Entering as: Choose Option Freshman Transfer student

 

Have you applied to Baker? Choose Option Yes No

 

If you have applied, have you been accepted? Choose Option Yes No Waiting

 

List high schools and colleges attended and years of attendance.

 

In 250 words or fewer, tell us why are you interested in attending Baker University? What would you like to get out of your college experience?

 

 

Essay | Applying Psychological Research to Your Own Life

In addition to the application, you must also answer an essay question and either email it to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or mail to the following address:

Baker University
Department of Psychology
Attention: Marc Carter
PO Box 65
Baldwin City, KS 66006

Successful psychology majors are curious. They are interested in the causes of behavior and test whether theories about behavior are scientific. In addition, psychologists examine whether their theories describe real-life behavior, whether their theories can be used to predict behavior, and whether their theories can be used to influence behavior.

Please read the excerpt below and answer one of the following questions in 500 words for fewer.

1. What one aspect of your life could you use this information to change? How would you go about it?
2. Which of these principles have you seen in real life? Describe that experience in the terms that Skinner would have used.

Theory

B. F. Skinner's entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of "operating" on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around its world, doing what it does. During this "operating," the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant -- that is, the behavior occurring just before the reinforcer. This is operant conditioning: "the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms tendency to repeat the behavior in the future."

Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a "Skinner box") that has a bar or pedal on one wall that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a food pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.

A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.

What if you don't give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he's no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior.

A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.

Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will "pop" right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!

Schedules of reinforcement

Skinner likes to tell about how he "accidentally -- i.e. operantly -- came across his various discoveries. For example, he talks about running low on food pellets in the middle of a study. Now, these were the days before "Purina rat chow" and the like, so Skinner had to make his own rat pellets, a slow and tedious task. So he decided to reduce the number of reinforcements he gave his rats for whatever behavior he was trying to condition, and, lo and behold, the rats kept up their operant behaviors, and at a stable rate, no less. This is how Skinner discovered that reinforcement doesn't have to be continuous to work.

This, according to Skinner, is the mechanism of gambling. You may not win very often, but you never know whether and when you'll win again. It could be the very next time, and if you don't roll them dice, or play that hand, or bet on that number this once, you'll miss on the score of the century!

Shaping

A question Skinner had to deal with was how we get to more complex sorts of behaviors. He responded with the idea of shaping, or "the method of successive approximations." Basically, it involves first reinforcing a behavior only vaguely similar to the one desired. Once that is established, you look out for variations that come a little closer to what you want, and so on, until you have the animal performing a behavior that would never show up in ordinary life. Skinner and his students have been quite successful in teaching simple animals to do some quite extraordinary things. My favorite is teaching pigeons to bowl!

Aversive stimuli

An aversive stimulus is the opposite of a reinforcing stimulus, something we might find unpleasant or painful.

A behavior followed by an aversive stimulus results in a decreased probability of the behavior occurring in the future.

This both defines an aversive stimulus and describes the form of conditioning known as punishment. If you shock a rat for doing x, it'll do a lot less of x. If you spank Johnny for throwing his toys he will throw his toys less and less (maybe).

This excerpt was adapted from webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html

Questions?

If you have questions or would like further information, please contact Marc Carter, Chair of the Department of Behavioral and Health Sciences at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it