Home-Schooling: Research Revisited
In an earlier issue of Vision, Brian Sponcil wrote an article about home-schooled children and their
performance on our Belin Elementary Student Talent Search (BESTS) test, EXPLORE. The essence of that article
was the somewhat surprising (at least to us) finding: home-schooled students in our talent search did as well,
if not better, than their counterparts in public and private schools.
Since then, home schooling has gathered more attention from researchers as well as the mainstream press.
Consequently, we felt it was time to revisit that small corner of our talent search population.
Fifty-one home-schooled children have participated in BESTS since 1998. Although those numbers are not big
by statistical standards, the pattern established in ’98 still holds. The EXPLORE test scores for the
home-schooled children are higher across-the-board than the test scores for private and public school students.
Because a true quantitative evaluation of these children was not possible due to the small sample size, we
decided to develop a fuller and richer picture of the children we did have. To that end, we asked the parents
of those children a few brief questions, the results of which are the subject of this article.
Initially, the parents were asked why they chose to home school their children. Although acknowledging that
there are many reasons for home schooling, we utilized a recent article in Gifted Child Today (Butler,
September/October 2000) to organize responses into five general categories. Fifty-two percent said home
schooling was chosen for curriculum issues, 21% for religious reasons, 9% believed their school was too
dangerous, 7% homeschooled to meet the needs of their learning disabled/gifted child, and 11% fell into an
"other" category.
It would appear, at least for the majority of our home-schooled participants, that curriculum issues drove
their decisions for home schooling. Unfortunately, we do not know how this compares to the national sample
of home-schooled children. Hopefully, in the future we will be able to make a comparison with this group of
children.
When asked if their children had ever been in the school system, 86% responded "yes." It is interesting to
note, however, that the migration of our gifted home-schooled sample was not in one direction only. Our data
suggest that when a family believes the school is more open or able to meet the specific academic needs of
their gifted child, then that child is more likely to be returned into the school system.
We will continue to investigate the issues related to this unique segment of our talent search population.
For more information regarding home schooling and gifted, please refer to the following articles:
Butler, S. (2000). "The ‘H’ word: Home schooling." Gifted Child Today, 23 (5), September/October,
44-50.
By Brian Sponcil and Damien Ihrig
Rudner, L. (1999). "Scholastic achievement and demographic characteristics of home school students in 1998."
Education Policy Analysis Archives, 7(8). Available on-line at:
epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v7n8/
Van Galen, J. (1988). "Explaining home education: Parents’ accounts of their decisions to teach their own
children." The Urban Review, 19(3), 161-177.
Welner, K. & Welner, K. (1998). "Contextualizing home schooling data: A response to Rudner." Education
Policy Analysis Archives, 7(13). Available online at:
epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v7n13.html