Teaching Materials Available
Who are these materials designed for?
Practitioners
I designed these teaching materials for my Master of Public Administration (MPA) students. They are mostly practitioners already working in government, non-profits, politics, health care, education, international affairs, and similar fields, while other students aim to work in those fields.
Modest quantitative background
These materials generally presume only basic math—calculations using arithmetic, formulas with simple arithmetic, reading graphs, and percentages—and basic descriptive statistics. A few materials presume or teach very basic inferential statistics.
What if my students are different?
For master’s and advanced undergraduates in business and other applied social fields, these materials would require little adaptation.
For more advanced students, these materials could be extended.
For other undergraduates or high school students, these materials would require more substantial adaptation. But I believe that the core approaches and some applications would work.
How do these materials help students learn?
Pedagogy
I have tried to use effective teaching methods: active learning, compelling contexts, interweaving topics, and so on. There are practice problems, some mixing different topics, and assignments in which students choose applications. Everything is taught using applications.
Product of trial and error
These materials combine established causal content with established pedagogy. They are the product of my more than 25 of years of trial and error. They reflect strategies developed for very specific errors and skills, the bits and pieces of causal literacy. By the way, there’s (useful!) jargon for that, pedagogical content knowledge.
What topics are covered?
- Causal effects
- Meaning of causation—counterfactuals/potential outcomes
- Interventions
- Mechanisms
- Causal diagrams
- Correlation, causation, common causes, reverse causation
- Logic of control variables and matching for observational data
- Randomized experiments
- Controlled quasi-experiments
- Natural experiments
- Generalizability
- Practical significance
- Statistical significance in randomized experiments
All these materials teach unfamiliar forms of analytical thinking in familiar contexts. Students have often found that the analytical thinking requires much time and effort.
Some topics are not yet present. I will add new materials. Download the “Teaching Materials Available Now” file above with the materials.
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To use these materials
Causal Literacy teaching materials © 2025 by Dahlia Remler licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Materials that have not been adapted may be used with attribution, provided they are not used commercially. Materials that have been adapted may be used with attribution and in any way, including commercially.
Please credit these materials using the same citation standards you would use for your own research and expect from your students. Suggested citation: Remler, Dahlia K. 2025. Name of Materials. CausalLiteracy.com/Teaching Materials/. Accessed DATE. For materials created collaboratively please also credit the collaborator.
If you use or adapt any of these materials, consider posting about your experiences in the comments
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Material
How do these materials
relate to Remler & Van Ryzin?
Unsurprisingly, these materials work well with my textbook co-authored with Gregg Van Ryzin, Research Methods in Practice: Strategies for Description and Causation, now in its third edition. However, you do not need to use our textbook to use these materials. These materials also include assignments and applications more explicitly targeted at practitioners than our textbook.