API-220: Reasoning From Evidence

Semester: Not Offered

Credit: 1.0

Faculty: Julie Boatright Wilson, Dan Levy

Schedule

Day Time Location
First Day
Meet Day
Review

Description

Policymakers and public managers often face difficult choices with no clear answers.  The most successful are not only good at negotiating the politics of competing interests, but are also effective at using evidence to inform and then support their decisions.

What is good evidence? Where should a policymaker or public manager look for information, and how should he or she turn information into evidence relevant to a given decision? This course is designed to help students develop skills in systematically assessing information of various kinds (quantitative, qualitative, and historical, among others). Key skills this course seeks to develop include determining what the relevant evidence is, assessing its quality, reasoning from the evidence, and making assessments about policy issues by integrating different forms of evidence. Interdisciplinary by nature, this course will draw from both technical material and illustrative case studies.

Prerequisi