Presentation at the AAPT
16^th Annual Workshop Conference

Dan O'Reilly, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Thompson Rivers University

"Using The Causality Lab To Teach Causal Reasoning"

One of the major challenges to teaching causality is explaining when a causal hypothesis is justified in light of associational evidence.  The Open Learning Initiative (http://www.cmu.edu/oli/) has developed courseware to teach students to understand the qualitative issues involved in causal reasoning.  One of the heuristic tools they developed to facilitate this process of causal discovery is the Causality Lab (http://www.phil.cmu.edu/projects/causality-lab/).  In this presentation, you will learn how the Causality Lab can be used to facilitate your students' causal discovery.  The lab uses causal graphs, Causal Bayes Nets (CBNs), and after a brief introduction to the theory of CBN you will be shown how to use the Causality Lab to discover the causal structure underlying a data set.  You will then be shown how you can create your own causal exercises to be used in the Causality Lab.

1. Link to a QuickTime Video (podcast) of the presentation: Podcast of Presentation (49MB)

2. Link to a PowerPoint presentation for the session: Creating a Causality Lab Exercise - Education vs Income (1.7 MB)

3. Causality Lab [http://www.phil.cmu.edu/projects/causality-lab/] (6.56 MB)

4. Link to a PowerPoint presentation for the session: Using the Causality Lab to Teach Causal Reasoning (1.1 MB)

Links Provided Within the Presentation

• Teaching the Normative Theory of Causal Reasoning (forthcoming). Scheines, R., Easterday, M., and Danks, D. in Alison Gopnik and Laura Schultz, editors, Oxford University Press [http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/scheines/scheines_revised.doc]
• Causal and Statistical Reasoning (online courseware) [http://www.cmu.edu/oli/courses/enter_causal.html/] This link gives a description of 2 different versions of the courseware.
• Open Learning Initiative  [http://www.cmu.edu/oli/] This link takes you to the page where you can register for the courseware.