"the achievement test scores of this group of home school students are exceptionally high--the median scores were typically in the 70th to 80th percentile; 25% of home school students are enrolled one or more grades above their age-level public and private school peers;"[1]
But it's psychological outcomes and averages, so I'd take any study with a grain of salt. It does match my experience having home-schooled friends growing up, it's just so much more efficient to be learning at one's own pace than that of the slowest kid out of 30.
This is kind of self-selecting. If your kids are poorly taught and don't have any collegiate aspirations, why are you going to subject them to achievement tests. You're not. So the only home school students taking those tests are those who are going to do well.
Compared to public schools, where most kids are going to take some kind of achievement test. Whether it be the SAT, ACT, or state-level grade advancement test.
It was indeed self-selected (parents volunteered to administer the test) and notes itself that it did not attempt to control for variables, and so should not be used for comparison purposes.
Also, the demographics are pretty wonky, as they note:
- 94% white
- 97.2% two-parent marriages
- 93.8% Christian mother (no info on other parent?)
- 2-3x general pop's attainment of 4 year degree or higher
- ~2x likelihood to be in the highest income brackets (50k+)
- Essentially no home schooling families in the lowest income bracket (0.8% vs 12.6% of all families with children)
I honestly think social sciences aren't all that amenable to the scientific method - too hard to control all variables - and I'm sure someone could cherry pick studies to say the opposite of what I'm posting here. But, what else can we do?
Agreed. Social sciences are notoriously difficult to rigorously normalize, mostly due to the natural variation and impracticality of recruiting a valid cohort (in $ or time).
It's a miracle even drug development on the harder science side works as well as it does.
But it's psychological outcomes and averages, so I'd take any study with a grain of salt. It does match my experience having home-schooled friends growing up, it's just so much more efficient to be learning at one's own pace than that of the slowest kid out of 30.
[1]https://epaa.asu.edu/index.php/epaa/article/view/543