This is designed to create intelligent consumers of policy research. The course is not designed to make students into policy researchers, but to enable them to understand the research done by others with a sufficiently skeptical eye to allow them to determine whether the findings of the research are valid given the assumptions made and methods used. This will involve, in part, learning by doing. In addition to learning about the building blocks of using statistics for understanding policies, you will be asked to work with real world data to make policy recommendations.

This is designed to create intelligent consumers of policy research. The course is not designed to make students into policy researchers, but to enable them to understand the research done by others with a sufficiently skeptical eye to allow them to determine whether the findings of the research are valid given the assumptions made and methods used. This will involve, in part, learning by doing. In addition to learning about the building blocks of using statistics for understanding policies, you will be asked to work with real world data to make policy recommendations.