Professor Givvin is such a gem. This class turned out to be one of the most interesting classes I've taken so far at UCLA. Each day in class, you review 1-2 articles of studies or literature reviews about educational topics. Some of the ones I remember off the top of my head are if professors providing powerpoints affects students' exam performance and how gender stereotypes affect working memory capacity. Professor Givvin makes each study manageable to understand and makes sure everyone's questions are answered. Her dog Jake is super cute too.

Class is 15% participation, 25% each for two midterms, and 35% final. Her tests made sure you understood the studies she went over, but there were no trick questions and she was always willing to clarify question during exams if you were confused. If you take this class, you will definitely take away lots of valuable information! It's (by far) been my favorite psych class.

Professor Givvin is easily one of my favorite professors at UCLA. She is an incredible person: funny, engaging, down-to-earth, and just GETS students. Her knowledge of educational psychology shows: she understands how to structure a class effectively to maximize learning while still making it fun, approachable, and interesting. She is just amazing! I will take any and every class she offers. She does not post lecture slides, which forces engagement with the materials in lecture and means that you cannot slack off. Clicker quizzes happen every class, which forces you to keep up with the material, which makes studying for the exams a piece of cake because you have been doing the work all along! Readings are research articles on different topics in educational psychology, which I always find way more interesting and engaging than a textbook. This also means that all the materials are free (besides the clicker). I wish UCLA would offer more education and psychology courses because I think they are just fascinating and so applicable to us as students. Bottom line, Professor Givvin is a wonderful person and I am so glad that people like her get to to teach at UCLA.

As someone who took this class for the grade distribution (and not out of interest), I actually found this class pretty interesting. The topics are all relevant and presented in an interesting way. Givvin is funny and has a very upbeat attitude. I would definitely recommend this class.

Grading Breakdown:
40% Midterm (Multiple-choice only)
45% Final (Multiple Choice + Short Answer)
15% Clicker Questions (3 points per class, lowest 2 scores dropped)

Exam Tips:
- She's not big on small details at all. It is mainly overarching questions and conclusions.
- She rarely focuses on method questions. However, know the articles that are only "literature reviews," as opposed to experiments.
- For the final, most of the short answer questions focus on the benefits of the article's topic. A question would be: name 3 benefits of x...
- You don't need to know the names of the authors, but it helps.
- We did not have one definition question all quarter. Again, it's just mainly themes and conclusions.
- Once or twice an exam, you'll get a question that lists words that come straight off the slides. They are easy to identify if you have read the slides enough.

With a little bit of studying (i.e. reading the slides a few times before each exam), you can easily attain an A/A+.

I thought that this professor was very good at presenting these studies proactively and interestingly. I think this professor cares about the students and cares about improving learning for students. They are clearly very passionate about the material they are teaching in this course. With that being said, I think there are a few areas that could use some improvement. Firstly, the biggest thing is that I believe that barring students from having access to the slides is not a good decision. To rationalize why she barred access to any form of slides, she did an entire lecture showing a study rationalizing why it was in fact in our best interest that we are barred from slide access. Mind you that the study (which was quasi-experimental and not replicated) results boiled down to the fact that slide access has no significant effect on exam performance. The only significant result was that if you have a high GPA, you are more likely to have a better exam performance. The inclusion of this study and the application of what she perceived to be the results truly perplexed me. Especially when there were studies that this professor covered with tru-experimental designs and high replicability that could and should be incorporated into the course such as Productive Failure. Something that made this class particularly difficult that worked in conjunction with the restriction of slide access was the fact that the teacher would be incredibly inconsistent with her terminology. She would refer to something as the intervention group, then later refer to that same thing as the treatment condition. This type of conversational speaking would be completely fine in a setting where I could refer back to the concrete findings that would be in the slides, but I was unable to do so, leaving my confusion about the inconsistency of terminology very much alive. All in all, this is a good teacher that has their heart in the right place. I just believe that they should be applying different teaching methods to maximize a healthy and seamless learning environment.

Professor Givvin is easily one of the best professors I've had at UCLA. Not only is she an amazing lecturer, her commitment to student's wellbeing both inside and outside the classroom is above and beyond. Just when looking at her commitment to the classroom, she ends every class requesting feedback whether we believed the reading was to challenging or not and how well we felt our class discussion supported our learning of the material. I will say, there is a lot of article reading involved. Each class we were assigned 1-2 research articles and we spent the lecture time discussing them. The articles chosen are fair short (~5-7 pages) and are always extremely interesting or relevant towards our life as students. There are no assignments outside of the 2 midterms (MC) and the final (MC+short answer). You can either chose to have your participation (attendance) included in your grade or not included. If you chose to have your attendance recorded (through the use of Iclicker) you're allowed 2 absences for the quarter.

Brilliant professor who is very kind and sentimental about UCLA. The class had 3 big exams, two of which were non-cumulative and covered the first 12-ish lectures with multiple choice questions. The third exam was the final which covered the last 4-5 lectures as well as overarching concepts from all of the lectures (so kind of cumulative). The final was the only exam with short-answer questions in addition to the MC questions, but they weren't super hard. Just come to class. Seriously, she explains each and every research study that she assigns (I never read a single one. Okay, maybe one or two, but still!). Very easy class and very engaging. I did get a little annoyed by the use of iClicker questions in every single lecture, but that's just a personal dislike of mine, and I do believe they helped. Also EC given!

Professor Givvin's class was a wonderful learning experience! Her class lectures were thorough and engaging, she always paused to confirm student understanding, and her tests were easy to perform well on if you read the assigned readings (the first two are fully multiple choice, and the final is a mix of multiple choice and short answer). The readings, which are weekly academic articles, are digestible enough to understand, but if you ever find yourself stuck office hours are a great resource. Note that Professor Givvin does use iClickers, so be sure to go to lecture if you want those participation points. Overall, 133F was one of the best, most applicable upper division psych courses I've taken at UCLA and I would definitely recommend to take this course!

I cannot put into words how much I LOVED this class. Professor Givvin is absolutely one of my favorite professors at UCLA so far. I took this class while lectures were in person and exams were ONLINE, so your future experience may be different.

We were assigned readings to do before each lecture, and during lecture we did clicker questions (participation points) and Professor Givvin prepared slides that basically gave a very thorough run-down of the readings. She DID NOT post the slides on Canvas, but I didn't mind this too much, as I took notes on my laptop. (She also had a reading assigned on posting slides for classes, which I found to be very amusing and an interesting read.)

Personally, I was terrified that I would fail the exams because I couldn't do some readings in time, but this was NOT the case. Professor Givvin's lecture slides covered everything you needed to know on the exams (which were a blend of MC and short answers). Our TA, Fran, also had office hours held as a review session, and they ALSO prepared slides as review. These review slides were a LIFE SAVER for the exams.

She is absolutely the kindest, sweetest, and most caring professor ever, and it's so obvious how a professor of education can really change the environment of a class. TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU HAVE THE CHANCE TO.

Professor Givvin is really sweet. You can tell she really cares about what she does and for her students. The only homework you have is readings, and these should be done before coming to class. She goes over the readings so much more in depth during class and it's super helpful. However, keep in mind that because you don't have any homework tests are weighed a lot more heavily. There are 2 midterms and one final. There were some questions on the exams that were a little tricky, but as long as you study the readings and have a basic understanding of each one of them, you should be fine. She has two grading schemes, one which includes a participation grade through Clickers and one that doesn't. She'll calculate the higher of the two at the end of the quarter automatically. Overall, I thought this was a super interesting class and that I learned a lot. I'd recommend it!!

Dr. Givvin is a very thoughtful and helpful professor and is incredibly knowledgable. Readings should be completed before every class but it does seem to be the case that many students do not read beforehand. Although she does cover the papers in depth in class, I would recommend that students do the readings for themselves to get the most out of her class. Overall, the workload is very reasonable and it is clear that she wants her students to succeed. One of the best classes I have taken at U.C.L.A. so far!