New Cardus Study of Homeschooling in Canada

This post reviews R. Pennings, et al., “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Measuring Non-Government School Effects in Service of the Canadian Public Good” (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2012).  Available for free download here.

Back in 2011 I reviewed the first Cardus Survey, which provided rare randomly sampled data about young adults who had been homeschooled in the United States.  This new study does the same for Canada.  In the first study the Cardus researchers uncovered some fascinating information about adult homeschoolers, some of which proved rather controversial because it was not very flattering toward homeschooling.

This new study’s results are fairly similar.  The study is about much more than homeschooling, but since this is a blog about homeschooling research I will limit my comments to the homeschooling findings.

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Homeschoolers and Mathematics?

This post reviews Kathleen Ambruso Acker, Mary W. Gray, Behzad Jalali, and Matthew Pascal, “Mathematics and Home Schooling” in Notices of the AMS 59, no, 4 (April 2012): 513-521.

All four authors of this paper are affiliated with American University.  The stated aim of this misleadingly titled paper is to analyze the legal framework for homeschooling, noting especially the place of mathematics in it, and then to examine how well homeschooling prepares students for college and employment.

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Homeschoolers in College: the Emotional Dimension

This post reviews Cynthia K. Drenovsky and Isaiah Cohen, “The Impact of Homeschooling on the Adjustment of College Students” in International Social Science Review 87, nos. 1&2 (2012): 19-34. [available here]

Drenovsky, a sociology professor at Shippensburg University, and Cohen, a former undergraduate student of hers, here present the results of a survey comparing the levels of self esteem and depression between homeschooled and conventionally-schooled college students. 

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Some Recent Homeschooling Articles in Popular Magazines

Here follow a few brief summaries of various articles that have appeared in the past few months that, while not scholarly, are still interesting and informative.  They include a story on homeschooling in China, an advocacy piece by a conservative Catholic, a description of public/private/home school hybrids, and a homeschool diary by a New Yorker:

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A Qualitative Look at What Children Think about Homeschooling

This post reviews Lizebelle van Schalkwyk and Cecilia Bouwer, “Homeschooling: Heeding the Voices of Learners” in Education as Change 15, no. 2 (December 2011): 179-190.

van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, both professors at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, here try to attend to the voices of actual homeschooled children to get a sense of what they think about the practice.

Since 1997 homeschooling has been legal in South Africa.  But research on homeschooling, assert van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, has very seldom paid any attention to what the children being homeschooled think about the experience.  What little information there is on childhood experiences is typically gleaned from impersonal surveys.  To correct this gap the researchers attempt a qualitative study that attends to the thick family context of beliefs, habits, and interactions.

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