Structured Homeschooling, Unschooling, and Public Schooling

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Sandra Martin-Chang of Concordia University and her colleagues went to study homeschooling versus public schooling, but they immediately recognized that their homeschooling subjects fell into two very different categories. Some parents took a structured approach, with clear goals, structured lessons, and often purchased curricula, while others took an unstructured approach, which many called unschooling.

When researchers administered a 45-minute achievement test in the children’s homes, the structured homeschooling group outperformed the public schooling group by a wide margin:

In 5 of 7 test areas, (word identification, phonic decoding, science, social science, humanities) structured homeschoolers were at least one grade level ahead of public schoolers.

They were almost half a year ahead in math, and slightly, but not significantly, advanced in reading comprehension.
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Homeschoolers retained their edge even after researchers made statistical adjustments for differences in family income and mother’s education level.

And if the recruitment process selected for homeschoolers with high skill levels, we can say the same about public school students. Both groups–structured homeschoolers and public schoolers–consisted of volunteers. Both tested well above grade level.

So the implications seem clear: Canadian kids receiving structured home schooling are testing very well, and it’s not merely a reflection of their parents’ affluence or educational levels.

How about the unstructured homeschoolers?

In every test area, unstructured homeschoolers got lower scores than the structured homeschoolers did.

In 5 of 7 areas, the differences were substantial, ranging from 1.32 grade levels for the math test to 4.2 grade levels for the word identification test.

Where the structured homeschoolers performed above grade level, the unstructured homeschoolers performed below it.
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Unstructured homeschoolers also performed worse than the public school kids did, though not by enough margin to rule out chance.

Comments

  1. Alrenous says:

    If someone expects unschoolers to perform well on schooling metrics, they’re being stupid.

    The point of unschooling is the claim that the metrics are wrong. That the opportunity cost of learning to identify words is learning how to live.

    Though it’s pretty funny that free-range kids don’t underperform children supervised by professional teachers.

  2. Isegoria says:

    Unschooling is not simply, or even primarily, based on the claim that public-school students are being taught the wrong material, and I don’t think most would question the importance of reading and building up vocabulary — in stark contrast to, say, memorizing the dates of important battles, the reigns of kings and presidents, etc.

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