CMU Causal and Statistical Reasoning web course
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CMU Causal and Statistical Reasoning web course
Suggested Course 1: Scientific Methods in Social and Behavioral Science
1 Causation: Preliminaries
2 Causation among Variables
3 Indeterministic Causation
4 Causal Graphs
5 Interventions
6 Relative Frequency
7 Conditional Relative Frequency
8 Association and Independence
9 Causation vs. Association
10 Causation to Association I: Unconditional Association
11 Problems with Causal Discovery
12 Confounding
13 Experiments
The educational goal of this introductory course is to train students to read newspaper level accounts of “research studies” critically. Can they identify the hypotheses being offered, e.g., that overconsumption of TV violence in childhood causes excessive aggression in adulthood. Can they identify the evidence offered for this hypothesis and describe alternative hypotheses that would explain the same evidence? Can they articulate additional research that might distinguish between these hypotheses. These modules, especially the first five, involve extensive case study analysis aimed at giving students practice at precisely these skills.