Teaching Causal Reasoning Online

Over the last 20 years, computer scientists, statisticians, philosophers, and epidemiologists have made great strides in developing a theory of statistical causal models, sometimes known as Causal Bayes Nets. In order to translate some of these theoretical gains to improvements in statistical or research methods curricula, the researchers created a web-based repository of courseware on the topic (www.phil.cmu.edu/projects/csr). The material has three parts: a set of lesson/modules for the declarative content, a repository of case studies to illustrate the concepts on real cases, and a Causality Lab to simulate the scientific process of setting up experiments, articulating causal hypotheses, making predictions from these hypotheses, and testing these predictions on the data collected.