Dear (future) AP Psych Student...

 

Dear (future) AP Psych Student,

Congratulations on your decision to take AP Psychology! My biggest piece of advice would be to start the vocabulary early and to set up a daily schedule within the unit so you're getting at least a few words done continuously rather than all at the end. The vocabulary is the main way you learn in the class, so learning it before the night before the quiz gives you the basic understanding you need and then you can use that time on the night before to review using more detailed external sources, such as the AP College Board videos, which go over terms that you don't learn int he class but still show up on the quizzes, which is pretty necessary. Otherwise, you can also use the time to work on the unit requirements instead of having to rush to do them when you come home after the quiz. Psychology here is set up to be a pretty interactive class that focuses on activities that showcase concepts instead of actually learning the concepts, so you need to have good habits to learn the concepts yourself. My personal favorite activity was making a brain out of candy or just in general, our Friday video/movie times that were a refresher after a long week. 

For Ms. Halfen, I think next year you should leave out the presentations for clinical psychology. While they were a change in pace and format, the lack of effort from some groups meant that unless one self studied more to make up for it, we were missing some key knowledge on some disorders. That unit is pretty vocab centric, and it would be helpful to not have to learn that from simple Google definitions our peers searched up the night before. I also don't think the videos in the Nearpods were necessary, or at least not as many. Next year, I would suggest modifying the powerpoints to contain definitions and information more often instead of just terms, because when reviewing, it's not useful to look at the powerpoints because I ended up having to just Google everything myself. Also, sometimes the quizzes would have terms we never covered in class but only knew through CB Videos (reliability vs validity, for example), so it would be nice if these could be covered in class as well. Instead of busy work on days you're absent, it would be nice to have more unit work days especially because there are times when there is only a week per unit. I understand that the times need to be short to fit everything in a semester, but then there needs to be given time for us to work in class to sustain that schedule as well.