“Evidence-based policy” is growing more important, yet few policy makers know how to evaluate evidence impartially. Many policy makers only believe evidence that reinforces their beliefs or supports decisions they have already made. Or they only trust experts they know personally. Or they only look at the prestige of the researcher and publication, and not at the evidence itself. None of these shortcuts leads reliably to truth. None leads reliably to good policy decisions. In this class, you’ll learn to evaluate quality of evidence. No evidence is perfect, but some forms of evidence are stronger than others. You’ll learn what kinds of evidence can demonstrate cause and effect, and what kinds of evidence generalize beyond the time and place where the evidence was first collected. You’ll learn by doing. Analyzing your own data helps you to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of analyses presented by others--and to learn what real policy data looks like (not the cleaned up toy datasets we use in textbooks). We do a lot of data analysis in class. For your final project, you’ll ask your own question, design your own study, and possibly collect your own data. Some graduates have gone on to get jobs as data analysts and researchers. All graduates end up as more informed consumers of evidence.