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Journal of School Choice
International Research and Reform
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A systematic review of the empirical research on
selected aspects of homeschooling as a school
choice
Brian D. Ray
To cite this article: Brian D. Ray (2017) A systematic review of the empirical research on selected
aspects of homeschooling as a school choice, Journal of School Choice, 11:4, 604-621, DOI:
10.1080/15582159.2017.1395638
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15582159.2017.1395638
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A systematic review of the empirical research on selected
aspects of homeschooling as a school choice
Brian D. Ray
National Home Education Research Institute, Salem, OR, USA
ABSTRACT
This article gives the demographic characteristics of the U.S.
homeschooling population and the reasons that parents
choose to homeschool, summarizes the findings of studies on
the homeschool learner outcomes of academic achievement,
social development, and success in adulthood, and proposes
future research on parent-led home-based education. The
majority of peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement
reveal a positive effect for the homeschooled students com-
pared to institutional schooled students, while a few studies
show mixed or negative results. Regarding social and emo-
tional development, a large majority of studies show clearly
positive outcomes for the homeschooled compared to those in
conventional schools. A majority of the studies on the relative
success of the home-educated who later became adults show
positive outcomes for the homeschooled compared to those
who had been in conventional schools. I recommend that the
existing literature be enhanced by well-controlled non-experi-
mental designs to examine adults who were homeschooled in
terms of an array of knowledge, attitudes and behaviors
regarding lifelong learning, rates of public welfare depen-
dency, and degree of personal agency or self-efficacy.
KEYWORDS
academic achievement;
college students;
homeschooling; social
development
Introduction
Parent-led home-based education is an educational choice that has existed for
millennia around the globe. Most people today call it homeschooling. Focusing on
the United States and its early history, the practice of parents being the main
educators of their children went from being the norm in the colonial period to
being the clear minority practice by 1900 (Ray, 2017a). In many developed western
nations, homeschooling was nearly extinct by the mid-twentieth century.
The homeschool movement startled the U.S. public and the education
establishment by mushrooming from only 13,000 K-12 students in the early
1970s to now roughly 2.4 million students (Lines, 1991; Ray, 2016; Redford,
Battle, & Bielick, 2017). The reasons for this mammoth growth will be
discussed in this article.
CONTACT Brian D. Ray bray@nheri.org National Home Education Research Institute, PO Box 13939, Salem,
OR 97309, USA.
JOURNAL OF SCHOOL CHOICE
2017, VOL. 11, NO. 4, 604–621
https://doi.org/10.1080/15582159.2017.1395638
© 2017 The Author(s). Published with License by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction
in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
First, however, some perspective is needed regarding homeschooling as a
school choice. Homeschool students represented only about 0.03% of U.S.
school-age children in the mid-1970s (Lines, 1991). One of the most careful
estimates of the size of the homeschool population placed it at 3.4% of
school-age children in 2012 (Redford et al., 2017). This 113-fold growth
occurred over roughly four decades. A nearly equal number of children are
being homeschooled as are enrolled in Catholic schools (National Catholic
Educational Association, 2014). By some estimates, there are only slightly
more students in public charter schools than are being home educated
(National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2017). Egalite and Wolf
(2016) succinctly put the growth of homeschooling into perspective with
the following comment:
Notably, all three of these choice mechanisms [homeschooling, public charter
schools, and school voucher or tax-credit scholarship programs] have experienced
remarkable growth in the past decade, a cause for alarm among school choice
opponents and celebration among supporters. (p. 442)
With such growth in the homeschool option over the past thirty years, there
has also come an accompanying burgeoning of research on the topic. It is
therefore challenging to keep reviews of research on the topic current and
meaningful. The base of scholarly research on homeschooling has grown
from a handful articles and studies in the mid-1980s to now a plethora of
theses, dissertations, chapters in books, books, and a quickly growing number
of basic qualitative and quantitative studies. This rapid growth in research is
offering more empirical evidence to help inform what have sometimes been
highly theoretical or polemical articles on the merits or demerits of the
homeschooling educational choice, and what research does or not tell us
about the effects of homeschooling on students and society (Apple, 2006;
Fineman, 2009; Murphy, 2012; Ray, 2013).
Many of the past surveys of research on homeschooling have not offered
clear or tight guidelines for the inclusion of articles or studies for review.
With that in mind, I have noticed a remarkable expansion of studies on
homeschooling in peer-reviewed journals over the past five years and this
fact has guided the approach for this review. Therefore, I am offering some-
thing new to the class of overviews of homeschool research. This article will
be a systematic review that relies solely on peer-reviewed empirical studies
for gaining an understanding of the effects of homeschooling on learner
outcomes such as academic achievement, social development, and how well
home-educated students are doing in life once they reach adulthood.
Although there has been ongoing scholarly debate about the relative value
of studies that appear in peer-reviewed research journals, peer review still
holds high value in the academic world (Goldbeck-Wood, 1999; Jefferson,
2006; Jennings, 2006; Roberts, 1999; Sampson, 2014; Sieber, 2006). Besides
JOURNAL OF SCHOOL CHOICE 605
being a new approach to the inclusion of research on homeschooling for
review, using this criterion serves as a reducing filter for an article that has
only limited space available. Finally, such a selection criterion serves to keep
conclusions about the effects of a currently minority approach to schooling
conservatively bound and reduces the likelihood that any author will make
biased claims in any direction about the value of home-based education
(Roberts, 1999).
The purpose of this article is to offer (a) a brief glimpse of the demo-
graphic characteristics of the homeschooling population and the reasons that
parents choose to homeschool; (b) a summary of specially selected studies on
the homeschool learner outcomes of academic achievement, social develop-
ment, and success in adulthood; and (c) some concluding remarks for future
research on homeschooling.
Methods
To seed this review and address its purpose, I searched and scoured the
entirety of the English-language set of homeschool research and scholarship.
Key sources for the searches were the government-sponsored Education
Resources Information Center (ERIC), Google Scholar and other online
databases, and an annotated bibliography that focuses on homeschooling
that has been continuously updated by Ray (2017b) since about 1983.
Throughout the literature exploration process, I searched for terms such as
homeschooling, home schooling, home education, unschooling, academic
achievement, social development, reasons, and motivations. The reference
lists from key texts that included reviews of homeschool research (e.g.,
Murphy, 2012; Rothermel, 2015), most of which the author was already
aware of, were used to generate additional possibilities, and the reference
lists from those texts were used in a snowballing process. At some point, the
fact that no new relevant references appeared gave me a strong signal that no
additional pertinent pieces were going to be found.
Only peer-reviewed sources were noted and included for the aspect of this
review that deals with the selected learner outcomes of academic achievement,
social development, and degree of success in adulthood. The purpose is to
compare homeschool students to those who were educated in conventional or
institutional schools such as traditional public, charter, or private schools.
This is the first review of homeschool research that I know of to use this
approach. This tactic enhances discipline and consistency in the review. It
reduces the opportunity for the reviewer to be arbitrary, capricious, or biased
in what is selected for inclusion. It theoretically enhances the methodological
soundness of the studies included in the overview, and thus makes the
conclusions based on the data more dependable. The key effort regarding
the learner outcomes studies is to provide succinct summaries of the studies
606 B. D. RAY
as data with minimal micro-evaluation of each individual study. The one
exception to the peer-reviewed criterion for inclusion was that state-provided
academic achievement data were included where they were available.
Observers of empirical research on the student outcomes of homeschooling
have voiced various concerns and cautions. First, a continuous note for three
decades has been that consumers of the studies should be careful about assigning
causation to a form of schooling when it comes to significant differences in
dependent variables such as achievement test scores, measures of social develop-
ment, and college GPA (e.g., Murphy, 2012;Ray,1986,1988,2000,2013;Rudner,
1999). Confounding variables such as length of treatment, parental involvement,
and demographics are often difficult, if not impossible, to control in studies
comparing homeschoolers to others. Although researchers would like to establish
causal relationships by randomly assigning students to homeschooling, public
schooling, and institutional private schooling,thisisnotfeasible.Further,most
studies on homeschooling include convenience samples that are likely not repre-
sentative of the targeted sample. With these methodological limitations in mind,
however, at least some of the empirical studies in the review that follows use
random selection (Green-Hennessey, 2014;Montes,2015), key control variables,
and student-matching approaches to partially control for possible confounders.
Second, researchers who do future studies on the effect of homeschooling
on students and adults should work very hard to gather data on the length or
authenticity of the treatment. That is, they should find out for how many
years the subjects have been in homeschooling, private schooling, and public
schooling. Such precision of data will help in understanding the different
effects of schooling approaches.
Next, various scholars have noted that many, if not most, homeschool
parents have different objectives and goals for their children than do institu-
tional public and private schools and parents who choose them (e.g., Morrison,
2015). If this is true, then one might wonder why there is so much focus on
standard measures of academic achievement, social development, and forms of
socialization that are developed and normed with institutional school students
and used for holding institutional state schools accountable to the taxpayer. In
a similar vein, many homeschool parents are more focused on the spiritual and
philosophical education of their children and therefore much of the studies on
homeschool students are, as Cizek (1993)posited,“the mismeasure of home
schooling effectiveness.”Further, some have argued that it is actually inap-
propriate, based on standards of the testing and measurement industry, to
apply standardized testing to homeschoolers (Cizek, 1988).
There are many fascinating aspects of home-based education that will not
be reviewed in this article; there is not enough space for them. The fact that
the parents in over one million families in the United States –and a rapidly
growing number in many other nations –are currently homeschooling their
children raises serious issues such as who should be in charge of the
JOURNAL OF SCHOOL CHOICE 607
education of children? What gave rise to the modern homeschool move-
ment? What services might parents better access via homeschooling rather
than public schooling (Cheng, Tuchman, & Wolf, 2016)? What impact will
private parent-led home-based education have on institutional schools and
society in general? Scholarly works have addressed these questions, but a
review of them is outside the scope of this effort.
Research evidence on the demographic characteristics of
homeschoolers
Studies over the past three decades have given a clearer picture of the variety of
demographic characteristics of homeschool families. One of the most-cited
sources on their traits is from the U.S. Department of Education (Redford
et al., 2017). Their 2012 nationwide survey revealed that 62% of homeschool
students live in cities and suburban areas, while the others live in towns and rural
areas. In terms of ethnicity/race, 32% of the children were minorities (Black/
non-Hispanic; Hispanic; Asian or Pacific Islander, non-Hispanic; or other, non-
Hispanic) while 68% were White, non-Hispanic. Twenty percent of the students
were categorized as “poor”and the other 80% were noted as “nonpoor.”
Regarding their parents’highest education level, 32% had a high school
diploma or less, while 14% had attended graduate or professional school.
Roughly one-fourth of the homeschool students were in each of the following
grade-level categories: K-2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–12 (Redford et al., 2017). For
some comparative information, Ray’s(2010) nationwide study found home-
school families to be very close to median income compared to married-
couple families with minor children living at home nationwide. It also
appears that minorities have become an increasing proportion of the home-
school community since 2003 (U.S. Department of Education, 2014).
Research on the religious preferences and political affiliations of home-
school parents is limited. Both U.S. and Canadian nationwide studies (e.g.,
Ray, 2010; Van Pelt, 2003) and local studies provide evidence that the
homeschool community is diverse on both variables. It is clear that parents
who identify as liberal, progressive, conservative, and libertarian are all
involved in homeschooling. Multiple studies indicate that home education
is common among agnostics, atheists, Christians, Jews, Mormons, New Age
adherents, and Roman Catholics. Internet searches quickly reveal plenty of
homeschool support groups, organizations, and publications that appeal to
each of these philosophical, religious, and political groups.
Research evidence on reasons for homeschooling
Research by the U.S. Department of Education has also become widely cited
regarding the reasons that parents choose to homeschool their children,
608 B. D. RAY
because their surveys are nationwide and engage many statistical controls.
Redford et al. (2017) reported the following:
In 2012, the most commonly selected reason was a concern with other schools’environ-
ments, which includes factors such as “safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure”at schools
(91 percent). Other commonly reported reasons included, “a desire to provide moral
instruction,”“a dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools,”and “adesire
to provide religious instruction”(77%, 74%, and 64%, respectively). (p. 11)
Parents were also asked to select the reason their most important reason for
homeschooling. “Concern about other schools’environments, desire to pro-
vide religious instruction, and dissatisfaction with academic standards were
cited most frequently as most important”(p. 11).
Montes (2006) also used data from a federal survey and found that, in general,
younger and older homeschooled students are educated at home for the same
reasons: parents believe they can provide them a better education (47%) and for
religious reasons (41%). Montes found, however, that younger homeschooled
students are twice as likely as their older counterparts to be educated at home
because the parents object to what the institutional school in their area teaches.
Younger homeschooled students are three times as likely to be homeschooled as
a way to develop character and morality than older homeschoolers.
Some researchers have begun to focus on why African-American parents
choose homeschooling. Ray’s(2015) quantitative study of black families pro-
duced results similar to those already noted. Further, about 40% of the parents
gave as a reason that they want to “give the child more instruction on African
American/black culture and history”and 20% said another reason they chose
homeschooling is that they “desire to avoid racism in public schools.”
Along similar lines, Fields-Smith and Kisura (2013)noted“the ‘push–pull’
factors that motivated black families in the Metro-Atlanta and Metro-DC regions
to exit traditional schools in favor of homeschooling their children”(pp.
278–279). The researchers found that these black parents were “able to impart
black cultural values to their children while exposing them to a global perspective
...”and the parents reported that “homeschooling also allowed them to ‘slow
down’their children’s exposure to what could be deemed as unsavory elements of
school socialization (e.g., racism, violence, drugs, etc.)”(p. 279). There are more
studies on minorities’reasons for homeschooling (e.g., Mazama, 2016).
Research evidence on the academic achievement of the
homeschooled
The literature search resulted in 14 peer-reviewed quantitative studies for
inclusion for the topic of academic achievement. Most of the studies included,
as dependent variables, students’scores on standardized academic achievement
tests. A summary of the items and their findings is presented in Table 1.
JOURNAL OF SCHOOL CHOICE 609
Table 1. Academic achievement of homeschool and institutional school students compared.
Study (Author/Year) Design
Subjects’
Grade
Levels or
Ages
Background
Variables
Controlled? Findings
Aram et al., 2016 Cross-sectional,
explanatory
K Yes Literacy skills equal or lower for HS
Ray, 2015 Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Grades 4–8 Yes Reading, language, & math scores
higher for HS by effect sizes 1.13, 0.65, &
0.60
Martin-Chang et al.,
2011
Cross-sectional,
explanatory;
matched-pair
Ages 5–10 Yes Letter-word, comprehension, word
attack, science, humanities, &
calculation scores higher than Public
for structured HS (by 0.06 to 0.15
effect sizes) and lower for
unstructured HS
Ray, 2010 Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Grades
K-12
No Reading, language, math, social studies,
& science scores higher for HS by effect
sizes 0.79, 0.85, 0.85, 0.81, & 0.77
Barwegen, Falciani,
Putnam, Reamer,
& Stair, 2004
Cross-sectional,
descriptive
High
school
Yes, one No difference in ACT (college
admissions test) scores
Duvall, Delquadri, &
Ward, 2004
Continuous
baseline probe
design
Grades 5–6 Yes Reading & math scores higher for HS
Medlin & Blackmer,
2000
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Grades 4–8 Yes Reading, math, social studies, &
science scores higher for HS
Ray, 2000 Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Grades
K-12
No Reading, language, math, social
studies, & science scores higher for HS
by effect sizes 0.84, 0.90, 0.87, 0.82, &
0.82
Rudner, 1999 Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Grades
K-12
No Reading, language, math, social
studies, & science scores higher for HS
by effect size 0.67
Duvall, Ward,
Delquadri, &
Greenwood, 1997
Cross-sectional,
explanatory,
matched-pair
Grades 3–8 Yes Language & math scores higher for HS
Russell, 1994 Cross-sectional,
explanatory;
path analysis
Grades
K-12
Yes Reading, language, math, & listening
scores higher for HS
Wartes, 1990 Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Grades
K-12
No Reading, language, math, & listening
scores higher for HS by effect size 0.41
Frost & Morris, 1988 Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Grades 3–6 Yes Vocabulary, reading, language skills,
work study skills, & mathematics scores
higher for HS by effect sizes 0.05 to 0.64
Wartes (1988) Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Grades
K-12
No Reading, language, math, social
studies, & science scores higher for HS,
effect size 0.41
The research designs terms are largely from Johnson (2001), types of research obtained by crossing research
objective and time dimension.
HS = homeschool.
Public = public school.
Private = private school.
Mixed = some findings more positive for homeschool and some more positive for conventional school.
n.r. = not reported or not readily usable/applicable for this type of summary table.
610 B. D. RAY
Six of the 14 peer-reviewed studies were cross-sectional, descriptive, seven
were cross-sectional, explanatory in nature, and one was a continuous base-
line probe design. In nonexperimental explanatory research, investigators try
to develop or test a theory about a phenomenon or try to identify the causal
factors (Johnson, 2001). In descriptive nonexperimental research, the
researchers primarily describe the phenomenon or document the character-
istics of the phenomenon (Johnson, 2001). In 11 of the 14 peer-reviewed
studies, there was a definite positive effect on achievement for the home-
schooled students. One of the 14 studies showed mixed results; that is, some
positive and some negative effects were associated with homeschooling. One
study revealed no difference between the homeschool and conventional
school students, and one study revealed neutral and negative results for
homeschooling compared to conventional schooling. Both state-provided
data sets showed higher than average academic achievement test scores for
the home educated.
Most of the studies did not explicitly use or present effect sizes. Effect sizes
could be gleaned, however, from 8 of the 14 studies and both of the state
datasets, ranging from 0.05 (small) to 1.13 (very large).
Some brief summaries of a few of the studies provide illustrations. Rudner
(1999), in his classic cross-sectional, descriptive study, analyzed the standar-
dized academic achievement test scores of 20,760 K-12 homeschool students
from 11,930 families. He summarized his finding this way: “Within each
grade level and each skill area, the median scores for home school students
fell between the 70th and 80th percentile of students nationwide and between
the 60th and 70th percentile of Catholic/Private school students”(pp. 28–29).
Rudner was careful to describe the limitations of his study related to general-
ization and wrote that his “study simply shows that those parents choosing to
make a commitment to home schooling are able to provide a very successful
academic environment”(p. 29).
Ray’s(2015) was the first attempt at a quantitative study assessing the
academic achievement of black homeschool children. He collected data from
around the country and was able to control for two confounding variables,
gender of the student and socioeconomic status of the family. The home-
school students were administered standardized tests by non-family members
and their scores were analyzed. The black homeschool children outper-
formed their black public school peers in the areas of reading, language,
math, social studies, and science with large effect sizes of 0.84, 0.90, 0.87,
0.82, and 0.82. Further, the black homeschool children scored the same or
higher than all races/ethnicities in the general school-age public.
Two studies found some mixed or negative results related to homeschool-
ing and both involved relatively young students. Aram, Meidan, and Deitcher
(2016) studied formal school and homeschool Kindergarten students
(matched on age and gender) and found “that there were significant
JOURNAL OF SCHOOL CHOICE 611
differences between the homeschooling and formal schooling groups in their
letter knowledge and name writing, favoring the formal schooling group”(p.
1013). There were, however, no differences between the groups regarding
phonological awareness. The authors pointed out that they were studying
very young children and outcomes might change as they get older, as the
Israeli school system might emphasize things that homeschoolers do not, and
that the homeschool families tended to be unschoolers who do not focus on
formal instruction.
The second study involved a careful matched-pair design with children of
ages5to10(Martin-Chang,Gould,&Meuse,2011). The researchers found
that children from structured homeschool settings outperformed their con-
ventional school peers, while children from unstructured homeschooling
underperformed the institutional school students. The authors also noted the
young ages they studied and pondered whether their test performance might
change over time, especially in light of research on older homeschool students.
Some observers have also wondered what would be found if achievement test
data were available from states where all or most homeschool students are
required by law to be tested. Two U.S. state departments of education have
made test data relatively easy to access which show that homeschool students’
test scores are consistently well above average (Oregon Department of
Education, 1999; Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1985).
Research evidence on the social development of the home educated
The search for peer-reviewed reports on the social development of home-
educated children and adults revealed 15 studies. Thirteen of the 15 showed
clearly positive outcomes for the homeschooled compared to those in conven-
tional schools. Two of those studies reported that some of the findings were
more positive for homeschool students but some were more positive for institu-
tional school students. Key details of these studies are presented in Table 2.
Most of the studies did not explicitly use or present effect sizes. Effect sizes
could be ascertained, however, from five of the 15 studies, ranging from 0.08
(small) to 1.55 (very large).
Only a decade ago, very few large and national databases containing data
on homeschool children or youth were available; it appears that this is
quickly changing. One example is the study by Thomson and Jang (2016),
which utilized data from the National Study of Youth and Religion. They
were able to control for several potentially confounding variables, and found
“homeschooled adolescents to be less likely to drink alcohol and, if they do,
less likely to get drunk than their public and private high school counter-
parts”(p. 295).
Shyers (1992), in his classic cross-sectional, explanatory, matched-pair
study of homeschool and conventional school 8- to 10-year-olds, found
612 B. D. RAY
Table 2. Social development of homeschool and institutional school students compared.
Study (Author/Year) Design
Subjects’
grade
levels or
ages
Background
variables
controlled? Findings
Guterman and
Neuman (2017)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory;
matched
subjects
Ages 6–12 Yes Lower depression for HS (0.08 effect),
less externalizing problems for HS (0.15
effect); no difference in internalizing
problems & attachment security
Thomson and Jang
(2016)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Ages
13–17
Yes Less underage alcohol drinking by HS
Montes (2015) Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Ages 6–17 Yes No difference in problem behaviors &
social competencies; HS argue less
than Conventional; mixed differences
on participation in activities
Vaughn et al. (2015) Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Ages
12–17
Yes Less use/abuse of tobacco, alcohol, &
illicit drugs by HS
Green-Hennessey
(2014)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Ages
12–17
Yes Stronger religious affiliation HS less
substance abuse and delinquency
than Conventional; weaker religious
HS no differences
Drenovsky and
Cohen (2012)
Cross-sectional,
descriptive
College No Self-esteem no difference; lower
depression for HS; higher GPA &
college experience for HS
McKinley, Asaro,
Bergin, D’Auria,
and Gagnon (2007)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Ages 8–12 No Several variables (e.g., cooperation,
assertion, self-control, conflict with
others); some positive and some
negative HS compared to Private;
some positive for HS and some
neutral HS compared to Public
Medlin (2006) Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Grades
3–6
No Cooperation, assertiveness, empathy,
& self-control higher for HS vs. Public,
effect sizes 0.13 to 1.55
McEntire (2005) Grades
7–12
Several life challenges variables (e.g.,
tension, sense of upbeatness, drug
use; lying, alcohol use), some more
positive for HS and some more
positive for Conventional
Francis and Keith
(2004)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory;
matched-pair
Ages 5–18 Social skills higher for HS than
Conventional, effect size 0.12; no
difference for problem behaviors
Sutton and
Galloway (2000)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
College Yes More positions of leadership for HS
Tillman (1995) Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Ages
11–14
No Family acceptance, academic
competence, peer, & personal
security higher for HS, effect size 0.61
Shyers (1992) Cross-sectional,
explanatory;
matched-pair
Ages 8–10 Yes Fewer problem behaviors (e.g.,
aggressive/passive) for HS; no
difference self-concept
Smedley (1992) Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Grades
K-12
No Social maturity (communication, daily
living skills, and the socialization
domains) higher for HS, effect size .99
Kelley (1991) Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Grades
2–10
No Self-concept higher for HS
The research designs terms are largely from Johnson (2001), types of research obtained by crossing research
objective and time dimension.
HS = homeschool.
Conventional = public or private school.
Public = public school.
Private = private school.
Mixed = some findings more positive for homeschool and some more positive for conventional school.
n.r. = not reported or not readily usable/applicable for this type of summary table.
JOURNAL OF SCHOOL CHOICE 613
very few differences on his dependent variables. There were no differences
between the two groups on student self-concept or passivity. Upon direct
observation of the children’s behaviors in play groups by research assistants
blinded to the schooling identity of the children, however, they found that
homeschool “students received significantly lower problem behavior scores
than did their agemates from [a] traditional program”(p. 5).
Research evidence on the relative success of the homeschooled into
college and adulthood
The search for peer-reviewed articles on the relative success of the home-
educated who had moved on to adulthood, whether in college or life in
general, revealed 16 studies. Eleven of the 16 showed positive outcomes for
the homeschooled compared to those in conventional schools. One study
found positive outcomes for conventional school students compared to
homeschool students. Finally, four of the studies found no significant differ-
ence between those from homeschool backgrounds and the others from
institutional school backgrounds. Most of the studies did not explicitly use
or present effect sizes. In the one study in which an effect size could be
ascertained, it was 0.62. Key features of these studies are displayed in Table 3.
It is clear that since the modern homeschool movement is now into its fourth
decade, significantly more adults in the U.S. population have been home
educated than was the case only a decade ago. Thus, more data are available
and more studies on them have been published. Cogan’s(2010)wasoneofthe
first tightly designed comparative studies. The dependent variables were first-
year GPA, fourth-year GPA, retention, and graduation rate and he was able to
control for several demographic variables. Multiple regression analysis revealed
that the college students who were homeschooled earn higher first-year and
fourth-year GPAs when controlling for demographic, pre-college, engagement,
and first-term academic factors. Further, there were no differences between
homeschooled student’s fall-to-fall retention and four-year graduation rates
when compared to conventionally educated students.
Cheng (2014), in one of the most methodologically rigorous studies to date
comparing college students from homeschool and other backgrounds, investi-
gated their levels of political tolerance. He found that “those with more
exposure to homeschooling relative to public schooling tend to be more
politically tolerant”(p. 64) and students who attended private schools were at
least as tolerant as students who attended public schools. Cheng concluded:
Both of the results conflict with the belief that a common system of public schools
is essential not only for all students but particularly for religiously conservative
students to learn political tolerance. Instead of decreasing political tolerance
among students who are more conservative in their religious beliefs,
614 B. D. RAY
Table 3. Relative success in adulthood of homeschool and institutional school students.
Study (Author/
Year) Design
Subjects’
grade
levels or
ages
Background
variables
controlled? Findings
Almasoud and
Fowler (2016)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory;
matched sample
College,
ages 17–28
Yes College final GPA higher for HS, effect
size 0.62
Yu et al. (2016) Cross-sectional,
explanatory,
matched sample
College Yes No difference first-year GPA & retention
Wilkens, Wade,
Sonnert, and
Sadler (2015)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
College Yes Calculus course grade higher for HS
Cheng (2014) Cross-sectional,
explanatory
College Yes HS more politically tolerant than Public;
HS no different from Private
Snyder (2013) Cross-sectional,
descriptive
College No SAT & ACT scores & GPA higher for HS
compared to Public & Catholic school
Drenovsky and
Cohen (2012)
Cross-sectional,
descriptive
College No Less depression, more positive college
experience, & higher GPA for HS; no
difference in self-esteem
Cogan (2010) Cross-sectional,
explanatory
College Yes Higher first- and fourth-year GPAs for
HS; no difference in fall-to-fall retention
& four-year graduation rates
Jones (2010) Cross-sectional,
descriptive
College No No differences in college entrance exam
scores, GPA, & activities involvement
White, Moore,
and Squires
(2009)
Cross-sectional,
descriptive
College No HS more agreeable, conscientious &
open than Conventional; no difference
in extraversion & neuroticism
Uecker (2008) Cross-sectional,
explanatory
Ages
13–17
Yes Involvement in religious community &
Private religiosity higher for HS
Qaqish (2007) Cross-sectional,
explanatory
College-
bound
Yes ACT math scores higher for
Conventional
White et al.
(2007)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
College Yes In college adjustment measures, HS less
anxious than Conventional; no
differences other 8 measures
Jones and
Gloeckner
(2004)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory,
match-sample
College Yes No differences in ACT scores, first-year
GPA, retention, & first-year credit earned
Ray (2004) Cross-sectional,
descriptive
Ages
16–69
No Various variables (e.g., civic
involvement, life satisfaction) more
positive for HS
Sutton and
Galloway
(2000)
Cross-sectional,
explanatory
College Yes More positions of leadership for HS; no
difference in GPA
Oliveira,
Watson, and
Sutton (1994)
Cross-sectional,
descriptive
College No No differences in critical thinking skills
The research designs terms are largely from Johnson (2001), types of research obtained by crossing research
objective and time dimension.
HS = homeschool.
Public = public school.
Private = private school.
Mixed = some findings more positive for homeschool and some more positive for conventional school.
n.r. = not reported or not readily usable/applicable for this type of summary table.
JOURNAL OF SCHOOL CHOICE 615
homeschooling is associated with greater political tolerance, and private schooling
is not associated with any less tolerance. (p. 64)
While Cogan (2010) found the home educated to be outperforming others, Yu,
Sackett, and Kuncel (2016) used a cross-sectional, explanatory, and matched-
sample design to explore the first-year GPA and retention rates of college
students. They found no difference between the homeschooled and others.
Qaqish (2007), on the other hand, examined the ACT math scores of
college-bound students and found, while controlling for background vari-
ables, that the conventionally schooled performed slightly better than the
home educated. On average, conventionally schooled students performed
better than the home educated by about two out of sixty items on the ACT
mathematics test. Qaqish conjectured that the result might be due to differ-
ent teaching/learning media used in teaching each of the two groups, differ-
ent teacher/student interaction, or to the number of years homeschooled
before taking the ACT mathematics test.
Discussion: thoughts on the future of research on homeschooling and
the choice of home education
If this systematic summary of peer-reviewed empirical work on homeschool-
ing had been conducted just one decade ago, about half of the studies in this
review would have been missing. With the expansion of the homeschool
population has come notably more research on the children and families
engaged in it and on adults who were home educated, more support systems
to encourage the practice of homeschooling, more media attention, more
attention from policymakers, more attention from serious scholarly critics of
this educational choice, and the general sense that it is much easier for U.S.
parents to make the choice to homeschool than it was only ten years ago. In
some ways, homeschooling is a very viable choice for mainstream Americans
and a growing variety of Americans who are not in the mainstream.
It is easy to see, even in scholarly literature on the learner outcome effects of
homeschooling, a strong current of polemic and contention about what the
empirical research does or does not tell academics, policymakers, parents, and
the public about homeschooling. Many relatively positive things are associated
with homeschooling as compared to institutional public and private schooling.
A short half-decade ago, Murphy (2012) presented an insightful survey of
scholarship on homeschooling and noted that “we know more than some
analysts suggest we do”and “we know a lot less than advocates of home-
schooling would have us believe”(p. 140). Since his review of the body of
research, several additional empirical studies have emerged. As the present
review shows, we now know even more than both the cautious critics of
homeschool research and advocates of home education knew back when
616 B. D. RAY
Murphy published. The evidence from the studies presented in a new way in
this review shed notable light on the generally positive relationship between
homeschooling and the three learner outcomes of academic achievement,
social development, and relative success in adulthood.
Future researchers should consider a few key questions. Using matched-pair
or other carefully controlled nonexperimental designs, how do the academic
achievement and useful life skills of adults who were completely home edu-
cated compare to that of those who were fully public schooled? What are the
differences in attitudes and behaviors regarding learning during adulthood
between those completely homeschooled and those completely institutionally
public schooled? Is there a difference in the rates of public welfare dependency
between adults who were home educated and others? Finally, is there a
difference in a sense of personal agency or self-efficacy between adults who
were homeschooled and others? While conducting these studies, researchers
should always be mindful to gather data on the authenticity and nature of the
treatment, such as the number of years homeschooled, institutionally public
schooled, and institutionally private schooled and the type of homeschooling
and institutional schooling experienced by the student.
It appears that homeschooling is continuing to grow and will do so
into the foreseeable future. The reasons why parents and teens home-
school are fundamental and have been durable over the past 30 years.
Thereissomeevidencethatthosewhowerehomeeducatedchooseto
homeschool their own children at a higher rate than does the general
public. With these factors in mind and the positive outcomes that
empirical research shows are related to homeschooling, the movement
andschoolchoiceislikelytocontinuetoexpandandtheresearchbase
on it will continue to flourish.
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