Victoria Rogers, School of Liberal Arts
Principal Investigator: Victoria Rogers, senior lecturer, School of Liberal Arts
Project Title: Causality and Inductive Reasoning
Funding Level: $5,000
Abstract:
A new online course is proposed, entitled Causality and Inductive Reasoning, which will be the third course in a grouping of related online courses offered by the Philosophy Department designed to increase critical thinking and logic literacy. This course will be focused specifically on inductive reasoning skills (including causal reasoning) and will contribute to meeting the increasing demand for online courses at IUPUI. Topics covered will include basic principles of inductive reasoning; philosophical conceptions of cause; techniques of causal discovery; and challenges to traditional models of causality. This course will be designed to follow on the scientific and statistical reasoning portion of the online Logic course (P162) so that students will have some continuity between the two courses; a secondary goal is to prepare students to continue into study in the Philosophy of Science if they so desire. The course will be based on a constructivist model of learning and employ a dialogic pedagogy, which will be student-centered and rely on active and interactive learning tasks and scaffolding approaches whereby students will begin learning a new skill with methods and models, and will gradually transition to being expected to perform that skill without assists. The course will be closely designed to foster learning outcomes associated with the PULs, in particular PULs 2 and 3: Critical Thinking and Integration and Application of Knowledge.
