Learning Experience

Learning Experience

Frances Ballard

University of Phoenix

PSY/103

January 10, 2011

Jane Robinson, Ph. D.

Learning experience

I have always found the act of baking cakes relaxing and the smell of cakes baking calming. I am not aware when this developed, but after moving in down the road from my grandmother, I developed an even deeper love for baking. My grandmother is a retired schoolteacher, but as a hobby, she decorated and sold cakes. The first time I helped her decorate a cake it was for a family member’s birthday. I had no prior experience to decorating a cake except spreading frosting from a can on the top of the cake. My grandmother showed me some tips and tricks, but mainly let me watch what she was doing. The next time we decorated a cake, I already had certain expectations about what I would be doing. I did what I expected, but was given more tasks from my grandmother. Learning the artistic techniques from my grandmother and the relaxed attitude toward decorating changed my outlook on what was a tedious task to me before then.

Growing closer to my grandmother with our experiences added to my learning processes. When I am in a grocery store baking aisle and I see the cake mixes, I think about the fun involved in decorating the cake. When I bake a cake, I think about the relaxing time my grandmother and I had spending the day elaborately decorating the cakes. The smell of my house when a cake is baking and the sight of the cakes cooling on racks, gives me an extra sense of calmness and contentedness. The love of baking has been a part of me as long as I remember, but my grandmother instilled a love of decorating cakes that I will carry with me throughout my adult life.

Learning Forms

My learning experiences with my grandmother occurred through different forms of learning-classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and cognitive-social learning. According to Carpenter & Huffman (2008), psychologists define...