Teaching Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy to Undergraduate Psychology Students

This article describes an experimental undergraduate psychology course that ran for two semesters during the 2009 academic year at a private, urban university in the United States. Students learned the techniques and strategies of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) with a focus on the practical elements of the process. Students often used the techniques to address their own real-life problems that they encountered during the semester. Descriptive data was collected from students at the end of the semester which revealed that students considered this course more "practical" than other psychology courses, the course content was highly relevant to the students, and that students valued the experience. The primary purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale for the course, present the developmental process and provide some early descriptive data about the course.