Homeschooling outcomes: How do they compare?
© 2022 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved
Homeschooling gets high marks…when parents provide structured lessons
Are homeschooled students good students?
When the topic comes up in conversation, people ofttimes cite studies showing that homeschoolers score higher on standardized tests.
For instance, Eric Rudner analyzed the exam scores of over xx,000 American homeschooled students and plant them to be "exceptionally high—the median scores were typically in the 70th to 80th percentile" (Rudner 1999).
That's impressive, but nosotros have to go on in mind: This wasn't a random cross-department of homeschoolers.
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Participants were recruited from a special subset of the homeschooling population–families who subscribed to a fee-based testing service.
Compared to their peers in the public schools, these kids were more probable to accept affluent, well-educated parents. Were the parents also more committed to educating their children? Perchance.
Then at that place is the problem of cocky-selection. Who agrees to participate in a study of this kind?
Parents may exist more likely to sign upwardly if they believe their children will test well. About 52% of those approached agreed to participate in Rudner's study. And then we accept to wonder well-nigh the people who declined. When we compare Rudner's homeschoolers to the general population, it's a bit like apples and oranges. The parents of public schoolhouse kids aren't a select group of motivated volunteers.
Finally, there were differences in the way the tests were administered. Ideally, we'd want everyone to have the examination under the same atmospheric condition, under the heart of a trained exam administrator. Only whereas public school students took their tests in the classroom, many homeschoolers took their tests at home with a parent.
New data: "The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence from homeschooled and traditionally schooled students"
Recently, Sandra Martin-Chang of Concordia University led a new study that attempts to address these problems.
Martin-Chang and her colleagues sought Canadian participants from both the homeschool and public schoolhouse populations, recruiting through community announcements, radio ads, and e-mail.
They ended upwardly with 37 homeschool students, and matched these with 37 similar-age public school students living in the same expanse. Overall, the students had these characteristics:
• They ranged in age from 5 to 10 years, and almost all of them lived with married or partnered adults.
• Most had mothers with higher degrees (65% for homeschoolers, 54% for public schoolhouse kids), and kids in public school were more likely to have mothers with graduate degrees (11% for homeschoolers, 30% for public school kids).
• Homeschool families had lower incomes, presumably because mothers in these families were more likely to have left the workforce.
In addition, the researchers discovered that the homeschooling group fell into two categories.
1. Almost homeschooling parents took a structured approach to instruction. They "set out articulate educational goals for their children and offered structured lessons in the course of either purchased curricula or self-made lesson plans (oftentimes some combination of both)."
2. A minority of homeschooling parents said they rarely or never used premade curricula and structured lesson plans. Some called themselves "unschoolers." As the authors note,
"These parents identified more than with the pedagogical view that education is gained via the natural consequences of the kid'due south day-to-day activities."
Obviously, these parents offered very dissimilar educational experiences to their kids. And then Martin-Chang and colleagues didn't lump them together with the structured homeschoolers. Instead, they decided to written report iii groups:
• Public school students
• Structured homeschooling students
• Unstructured homeschooling students
Achievement testing, and the results
How did these groups compare?
To find out, researchers administered a 45-minute achievement test in the children's homes. The questions—which were borrowed from the popular Woodcock-Johnson Test of Achievement—covered vii distinct bookish areas, including reading comprehension, science, and mathematics.
Overall, the structured homeschooling group performed much amend than the public schoolhouse group. And the margin was pretty dramatic.
In 5 of 7 exam areas, (discussion identification, phonic decoding, science, social scientific discipline, humanities) structured homeschoolers were at to the lowest degree one grade level ahead of public schoolers.
They were almost half a year ahead in math, and slightly, but non significantly, advanced in reading comprehension.
But this is a relatively small written report. Was the homeschool reward due to random factors?
Information technology's unlikely.
Researchers calculated the probabilities of getting these results due to random run a risk alone. For scientific discipline and calculation, these probabilities were 1.ix% and 2.6%. For word identification, decoding, and social scientific discipline, the probabilities were all below 0.07%.
Was the homeschool reward merely the result of socioeconomic privilege? That seems rather unlikely too. Homeschoolers retained their edge even later researchers fabricated statistical adjustments for differences in family income and mother's education level.
And if the recruitment procedure selected for homeschoolers with loftier skill levels, we can say the same about public school students. Both groups–structured homeschoolers and public schoolers–consisted of volunteers. Both tested well higher up grade level.
So the implications seem clear: Canadian kids receiving structured home schooling are testing very well, and it'south not merely a reflection of their parents' abundance or educational levels.
Simply the story may be very different for kids who receive unstructured homeschooling.
In every exam area, unstructured homeschoolers got lower scores than the structured homeschoolers did.
In 5 of 7 areas, the differences were substantial, ranging from 1.32 class levels for the math test to iv.2 grade levels for the word identification examination.
Where the structured homeschoolers performed above grade level, the unstructured homeschoolers performed below it.
The chance that unstructured homeschoolers performed worse due to random factors? Less than 0.07%.
And again, the pattern held even afterward controlling for family income and maternal education.
Unstructured homeschoolers also performed worse than the public schoolhouse kids did, though not by enough margin to dominion out chance.
The researchers conclude that "structured homeschooling may offer opportunities for academic operation beyond those typically experienced in public school."
What are these opportunities?
They seem pretty obvious. Homeschooling typically involves a depression teacher-student ratio and highly individualized education. Information technology's private tutoring, which has always been associated with efficient learning.
Just Martin-Chang and colleagues are keen to point out the limitations of this research. We demand more studies with larger samples.
And the researchers would like to investigate the relationship betwixt structure and academic achievement. Might homeschool students benefit from a mixed approach? If and so, how much structure is optimal?
I wonder, too, near private variation. We all know that some kids find information technology harder to adapt to demands of formal teaching. Are some parents are drawn to unstructured homeschooling because their kids don't fit the mold?
If so, that might explain some of the results hither. And it suggests that homeschooling parents–like many classroom teachers–need to discover new ways to reach these students.
References: Homeschooling outcomes
For a concise analysis of the history of research on this topic, bank check out Eric Isenberg'south article for the Peabody Journal of Education:
Isenberg E. 2007. What have we learned about homeschooling? Peabody Journal of Education, 82: 327–409.
Encounter also these papers (cited above):
Kunzman R. 2009. Understanding homeschooling: A better approach to regularization. Theory and Research in Education, 7: 311–330.
Martin-Chang Due south, Gould ON, and Meuse, R East. The impact of schooling on bookish accomplishment: Bear witness from homeschooled and traditionally schooled students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Scientific discipline 43(3): 195-202.
Rudner L. 1999. Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 7(one) 1-38.
Content last modified 9/11
Paradigm of students at blackboard past Masae / wikimedia commons
Source: https://parentingscience.com/homeschooling-outcomes/
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