Causal Inference for Time-Varying Instructional Treatments

The authors propose a strategy for studying the effects of time-varying instructional treatments on repeatedly observed student achievement. This approach responds to three challenges: (a) The yearly reallocation of students to classrooms and teachers creates a complex structure of dependence among responses; (b) a child’s learning outcome under a certain treatment may depend on the treatment assignment of other children, the skill of the teacher, and the classmates and teachers encountered in the past years; and (c) time-varying confounding poses special problems of endogeneity. The authors address these challenges by modifying the stable unit treatment value assumption to identify potential outcomes and causal effects and by integrating inverse probability of treatment weighting into a four-way value-added hierarchical model with pseudolikelihood estimation. Using data from the Longitudinal Analysis of School Change and Performance, the authors apply these methods to study the impact of “intensive math instruction†in Grades 4 and 5.