Courtney Gann and Dan Carpenter, “STEM Teaching and Learning Strategies of High School Parents With Homeschool Students,” in Education and Urban Society 50, no. 5 (2018), pp. 461-482. [Abstract Here]
Summary: Gann, an Adjunct Instructor in STEM education at Texas Tech University, and Carpenter, previously at Texas Tech but now an Assistant Professor at the University of Findlay, here present the results of a study of the methods used by homeschooling parents to teach their children science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subject matter.
The authors begin with a strong literature review of the scholarship to this point on homeschooling curriculum and pedagogy. Highlights include the frequent finding that most homeschoolers tend to be fairly eclectic in their curriculum choices and their pedagogical approaches, that parental teaching styles evolve over time and as children age, that many homeschoolers rely on community networks in many ways, and that homeschooling parents often struggle with the lack of free time they have.
Next they provide a brief orientation to four theoretical frameworks for understanding how children learn. First comes behaviorism, which posits that people learn from direct instruction and practice. Second is information processing, which adds that prior knowledge influences how new information is processed. Third comes individual constructivism, which understands knowledge to be actively constructed by children (rather then being passively received from adults). Finally comes social constructivism, which adds that this construction is influenced by socio-cultural context.
With this background in place, Gann and Carpenter explain their own qualitative case study. They recruited subjects from a single co-op meeting on Fridays that one of the researchers (my guess would be Gann) had been attending for two years. Twenty-nine parents, all with at least one high school-aged student, filled out a survey about STEM instruction in the household. From that sample 10 subjects were chosen for home visits to observe their STEM instruction, followed by interviews about their practices.
Gann and Carpenter do not present quantitative findings from their original survey. Instead, they provide detailed descriptions of four categories of STEM instruction they observed during their home visits. Here they are:
Individualized Instruction. Parents used mixed methods as the individual circumstances required. Parents tried to choose the right method of instruction to fit their individual child’s learning styles and interests. Two subcategories within this overarching paradigm are presented:
Mastery Learning Techniques. Parents who took this approach were not motivated by getting through given amounts of content per day imposed by some extrinsic schedule. Instead, they waited until their child had achieved true mastery of a topic before moving on.
One-on-One Tutoring. Almost every parent in both the survey and the more extensive interviews following observation mentioned one-on-one instruction, whether by parent or a tutor, as the key pedagogical strategy they employed, and Gann and Carpenter watched this happen over and over in their observations.
Self-Directed Study. Parents using this approach transferred responsibility for learning directly to the child. As with one-on-one, almost every parent mentioned this approach. These high-school age children were trusted to decide how much time to spend on a given subject and how best to learn about it. The parent was there as a resource, but the child was expected to work on her or his own to the fullest extent possible. “In some instances,” note Gann and Carpenter, “parents were observed having little to no interaction with their high school students, allowing the student to work independently.” (p. 473).
Collaboration. Parents mentioned and the authors observed two sorts of collaboration. First was student-to-student collaboration at the co-op and through other STEM-related group activities in which many of the co-op children participated. Second was the collaboration between student and parent. Unlike one-on-one, in this case the student and parent were both trying to figure out the answer to a problem or whatever, and sometimes the child ended up explaining things to the parent.
Application and Connection. Many parents were intentional in their efforts to connect STEM content to real life situations. In this particular co-op, many of the students were involved in an extracurricular robotics team led by one of the fathers. Parents also mentioned trying to connect concepts being learned in class to everyday items, such as working in study of a particular kind of caterpillar taking over the yard into biology class or thinking about yard work with shovels and wheelbarrows through the lens of physics.
After explaining the four categories, the authors lay out some implications of the study for different audiences. They suggest that other homeschoolers might pick up some tips from these findings, that curriculum makers might want to tailor their homeschooling products to homeschoolers by emphasizing customized study and practical applications. Providers should understand that often parents and children are working through the material together and that parents might need a little extra help understanding what is going on.
Gann and Carpenter conclude with a tidy paragraph summarizing the findings, worth quoting here:
Results demonstrate that parents often use individualized instruction, which they customize based on their students’ needs and available resources. This individualized instruction relies on one-on-one tutoring and the use of mastery learning techniques to maximize student understanding. Parents also promote self-directed learning, encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning. Other instructional strategies used in STEM education include the collaboration of students with peers and the collaboration of students with parents, as well as the application and connection of information. (p. 478)
Appraisal: Some demographic data, especially parent socioeconomic background and education level, would have been nice to have for this sample. The article makes STEM education among homeschoolers sound wonderfully progressive and comprehensive. For this sample it probably is. Given that one of the researchers, a college professor, was intimate with the members of this co-op, my guess is that the demographics skew toward the classic white, well educated, upper-middle class families from a college town who, when studied exclusively, make homeschooling look very good. For children of privilege, with parents who either know a lot of science themselves or at least have the ideal that STEM subjects are important, and with the resources to provide a rich learning environment, homeschooling science education seems wonderful.
However, a significant body of previous research has found that on the whole homeschoolers tend to underperform relative to their institutionally-schooled demographic peers in mathematics, and they tend to major in STEM fields in college at lower rates. This so-called “math gap” is not huge, but it has been documented repeatedly over the past several decades.
This study’s findings are wonderful for what they are. The study was well-designed and the article well-written, presenting an intimate look into homeschoolers’ actual homes as they are actually homeschooling. The categories presented here will not surprise homeschoolers, but it is very handy to have them documented and organized so clearly. I anticipate that this article will be cited over and over in the next several years as evidence for how homeschoolers teach math and science. Many of those citations will likely not mention that the sample is likely skewed, but even so, it’s a real contribution to the literature on homeschooling pedagogy.
Milton Gaither, Messiah College