Pavlov's dog has nothing on Maria Vita's rats.

Vita's Advanced Placement Psychology students at Penn Manor High School are involved in a three-week project using the tiny black and white test subjects.

In recent years, Vita's rats have become something of a YouTube sensation for the class as members upload videos of their rats.

Harley, Roxy, Izzy, and Echo, to name just a few, are learning what it takes to score a sugar pellet, cheese curl, ride on the wheel or experience other forms of positive reinforcement from the students.

"We're using operant conditioning," explained junior Bri Reisinger. She and partner Katrina Reiff, a senior, are training Echo to shoot some hoops with a plastic ball.

"It takes a lot of patience," said junior Alicia Herr. "Sometimes (the rats) are not motivated."

Vita challenges her students to describe behaviors using approximately 50 psychology terms.

With her encouragement, Vita said her students are "always applying the vocabulary in a very substantial way" when playing with the rats.

The classroom is a virtual three-ring circus of rats performing obstacle courses, balancing tricks, and feats of mental and physical agility. A Skinner box, or operant chamber, forces the subject rat to adapt to a variable ratio, meaning it must learn how many times to push on a lever before a reward is dispensed.

Between handling the rats and their edible rewards, the students reach for sanitary hand wipes.

"Sometimes they bite," said senior Joe Timmins.

One form of positive reinforcement is a simple clicker, which tells the animals when they succeed.

Vita's students have an abundance of affection toward the rats, with students volunteering to take the rats home over the weekends.

"We're one of the few high schools in the country that get to do this," said Vita, who last year received an honor from the American Psychological Association for her techniques and was an APA TOPSS Excellence in Teaching award recipient in 2012.

Recently, a college psychology professor told Vita the rats are one of the most creative experiments he's seen in a high school psychology class.

One of Vita's former rats holds the world record for long jump —a 26 inch catapult which is forever memorialized in the slo-mo glory of YouTube. (The jump is at the 1:40 minute mark of the video below.)

Vita hopes one of her current students can coach a rat to break the record.

AP Psychology is one of the courses being considered as an open campus offering with Hempfield and Manheim Township High Schools for the 2013-14 school year, according to district officials.

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