The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [8]
In a 1993 article, Maralee Mayberry looked at some of the variables known to correlate with successful learner outcomes, such as “an atmosphere of cooperation and interdependence” and “an orderly but warm and concerned learning environment,” and found that many were common in homeschool settings.
J. F. Rakestraw, looking at Alabama homeschoolers in 1987, and Jon Wartes, looking at homeschoolers in the state of Washington in 1990, both found that the possession or lack of a teacher credential by homeschool parents had no effect on educational outcomes for the homeschooled students.
In the same study of Washington homeschoolers, Wartes also found no differences in educational outcomes between homeschooling families using a school-like teaching style and those with a less formal style of learning.
Florida researcher Richard Medlin administered a battery of aptitude, achievement, and attitude tests to thirty-six homeschooled children. Comparing the scores on the different types of tests, he found that achievement test scores were higher than aptitude scores, and he concluded that the higher achievement test scores could not be credited solely to ability. Oddly, he also found that although a shorter school year and less formal teaching style correlated with higher scores, parents felt a greater degree of satisfaction with more formal programs.
Affective outcomes, or the social development of homeschooled students, is also a major topic of homeschooling research:
April D. Chatham looked at the social contacts of Oklahoma twelve- to eighteen-year-olds in 1991. For a month, twenty-one homeschooled and twenty public school teens kept records of the number of people they talked with for at least two minutes. According to Chatham, the homeschooled students were not much different in the number of social contacts they had, but they did not feel as much support or closeness from their peers as the school students did.
For his 1992 doctoral dissertation, L. Edward Shyers studied the social behavior and beliefs of eight- to ten-year-olds. He found that the children had similar views of themselves, whether schooled or homeschooled, but that children who had always been homeschooled showed significantly fewer behavior problems.
In a review of existing homeschooling research published in 1991, Wartes and Brian Ray found that homeschoolers generally score as well or better than their schooled peers on tests of academic achievement and that homeschooled students are confident and well adjusted emotionally and socially.
And what about the long-term effects? How do homeschoolers fare in their adult lives? (This area of research is only starting to be explored because only recently have there begun to be large enough numbers of homeschooled adults to study.)
J. Gary Knowles, in 1993, studied fifty-three adults who had been homeschooled. He found that none was unemployed or on public assistance and that, typical of the age group, two-thirds were married. A higher-than-average proportion were self-employed. More than 75 percent felt that homeschooling had enhanced their social skills, and 96 percent said they would choose to be homeschooled again if given a second chance at childhood.
Evaluating the Research
All that research sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? The closest thing to a negative finding in that whole list is the Oklahoma study in which homeschoolers’ peer friendships were less intense than schooled kids’, and that could be easily explained by homeschoolers’ normally close family relationships and their wider assortment of friends of all ages. But what about all the negatives of homeschooling? Where’s the research that shows all the problems homeschooling