This is an enjoyable and interesting class. The content is really interesting the professor clearly cares about what she is teaching. Your grade is made up of participation points (iClicker), biweekly extension assignments/quizzes, a research project, one midterm, and a cumulative final. The assignments are all straightforward and not time-consuming at all. Your lowest extension assignment and quiz is dropped. The exams are online, open book, and consist of multiple choice and short answers. The questions are not difficult as long as you take some time to study. The professor is kind and her lectures are engaging. The only downside of this class is that you need the textbook for assignments and it’s difficult to find online, so you will likely have to buy it. If you need a Psych elective that won’t stress you out too much, this is a great class to take.

Overall this class was fairly easy and had a very manageable workload. Both the midterm and final were online, open note, and not proctored. The final is cumulative. Lectures were recorded on bruin cast, but Prof Ankowski has iClicker questions that are required for participation points. Personally I did not read the textbook and still did well in the class, and almost every answer to questions on the exams could be found in the lecture slides insted of the textbook. I do not think that you need to read the textbook for this class, and you can definitely get an A without reading it. Prof Ankowski is a great professor with clear, interesting, and easy-to-follow lectures, and she is super open to answering student questions/encourages people to come to office hours. The assignments for this class consist of 4 10-question multiple choice online quizzes, 4 short written assignments, 1 written research assignment where you basically just summarize and relate an existing study to class material, iClicker participation, and the midterm and final exams. This is a fairly manageable and easy class that doesn't require a ton of effort, and should be mostly review if you've taken a developmental psych class before.

1. Professor Ankowski is very passionate and knowledgeable about cognitive development. However, I find her lectures a tad disorganized, and her slides not helpful for review. I understand she wants people to attend lecture, as seen in her commitment to iClicker, but the lack of information present on the slides (while it may encourage people to come to class), is not helpful for review purposes. However, she records the class, which is a helpful addition. Moreover, this may be a personal preference, but I appreciate when professors explicitly define a term before they provide examples. Professor Ankowski sometimes does not provide definitions of terms/concepts or maybe breezes through them and then starts providing example after example. While examples are helpful, they ultimately mean nothing out of context, which she only loosely gives. I have had a surplus of upper-division psychology professors who I have enjoyed, and these issues seem unique to this class. On a separate note, I found that the midterm was not equitable to the types of questions we have been given on quizzes. The quizzes are almost too easy, whereas the midterm seemed unreasonably difficult. The wording of the questions was the most abstract. Furthermore, she opened her first lecture up by saying she is unwilling to revise grades, which is fine and completely up to her, but her presentation was very stern and seemed unfriendly. Since, I have not felt comfortable asking questions or even participating in class.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class. I thought that Professor Ankowski did a really great job at presenting the material in a manageable but also engaging way. She is a really good speaker and is very knowledgeable on the topic, which makes the whole lecture flow.

Fairwarning, lectures are 2 hours and she uses the whole 2 hours. All of the lectures are recorded, however, attendance is taken using iclicker.

The course consists of 5 or 6 labs. Some of them are individual, some are group work, so it's nice to establish a consistent group of friends/classmates to work on the labs together with. The labs themselves are pretty straightforward and easy.
I thought that the midterm and final were both also very easy. Both tests had an mcq portion and a short response part. There are a lot of terms to know, so it helps if you’re good at memorizing things. I used quizlet as my main study method. ALSO Prof. Ankowski provides you with the Pysch test bank as a study resource. USE IT. It was so helpful for both the midterm and final. A lot of the question were very similar, so it was a great practice test.