Objectives and What Students Should Be Able To Do After This Activity
- Determine if a headline is making an associative or causal claim
- Determine if a variable was measured or manipulated
- Come up with potential operationalizations for variables
- Become skilled at extracting a lot of information about a study just from a headline about the study
Prerequisite Knowledge
- Is a variable an IV or DV
What Students Struggle with
- applying guide from video lecture to assess if a claim is causal vs. associative
- whether a variable is measured vs. manipulated
- suggesting a specific operationalization as opposed to a vague one

Objectives and What Students Should Be Able To Do After This Activity
- Same as Headlines 1 plus
- learn to scrutinize a headline to think about other potential causal explanations or other ways that the variables could be related such as reverse causality or a confound.
- Identify potential mechanisms or moderators for a given IV and DV
- Determine if a study is an experiment or observational study
- Determine if a study design warrants a causal claim or not
Prerequisite Knowledge
- Familiarity with different types of variables (mechanism, reverse causality, confound, moderator, alternative cause)
What Students Struggle with
- understanding and coming up with moderators
- distinguishing experiments vs. observational studies