After this lesson, students should
- Identify cases in which "ideal" RCT experiments are not possible, due to ethical or practical constraints.
- For a given scenario in which a causal hypothesis/claim is being made, identify plausible alternative hypotheses that could be consistent with the data.
- Identify additional sources of evidence that could be used to help mitigate flawed experiments, including prior plausibility, dose-response relationships, specificity, temporal ordering, and consistency across contexts.
- Recognize when causal evidence in the absence of an RCT can be fairly compelling, especially if there are many different types of evidence combined.