Record: Shiri Pearlman-Avnion and Mor Grayevsky, “Homeschooling, Civics, and Socialization: The Case of Israel” in Education and Urban Society 51(2017): 970-988. [Abstract here]
Summary: Dr. Shiri Pearlman-Avnion is a lecturer at Tel-Hai Academic College in Tel-Hai Israel. She is primarily interested in educational psychology, Autism Spectrum DIsorder, meta-cognition, and theory of mind. I was unable to find any information about her co-author Mor Grayevsky. Here the pair look for differences between homeschooled and schooled young people in civic engagement and social self-efficacy.
They begin with a helpful (for an American like myself) overview of public education in Israel. Education in that country is compulsory for kindergarten through 10th grade. To homeschool one must apply for an exemption. This application must include a parent’s summary of her (it is almost always her) educational approach, the program itself, and the method of assessment that will be used to evaluate the program. The number of homeschoolers, while still small, has grown steadily since the 1980s. Pearlman-Avnion and Grayevsky say that many Israeli homeschooling families have not submitted an application and are thus “delinquent.” (p. 972)
GIven this growth, Pearlman-Avnion and Grayevsky believe study is warranted. They are especially interested in two aspects of the socialization question: civic engagement and social self efficacy (defined as an individual’s ability and confidence in social situations). Previous research has found that homeschoolers generally grow up to be engaged, well-adjusted people, no more prone to civic asociality or inefficacy than children who attend schools. Pearlman-Avnion and Grayevsky want to see if this holds for Israel.
To find out they accrued a sample of 78 high schoolers, 42 homeschooled and 36 schooled. The parental education background of both groups was very similar, but the homeschool group had more boys than girls (24 to 18), while the school group had far more girls than boys (29 to 7). Both groups were recruited though the internet and then through snowballing from previous contacts who had agreed to be in the study. Both groups completed the Civic Measurement Models questionnaire for civic engagement and Adolescent Social Self-Efficacy Scale for that variable. Demographic material was also collected, as was a survey of personal opinions about the education they had received to this point and, if a homeschooler, how many years the student had been homeschooled. All of these questionnaires and surveys together took about 10 minutes to complete per student.
The results of the tests showed that homeschooled teens and schooled teens had about the same civic engagement, and length of homeschooling had no effect. For social self-efficacy no difference was found overall between the two groups overall, but the longer a child was homeschooled the lower her self-efficacy. This last finding lends some credence to the stereotype that homeschoolers can be shy and awkward in social situations.
Appraisal: First of all it is nice to have a study of homeschooling in Israel by someone other than Guterman and Neumann, who have been published so widely in recent years. Like so much of the homeschooling research we report on in these blogs, we have a convenience sample. Happily the two convenience samples of schooled and homeschooled children are demographically comparable, though they are very different in terms of their gender constitution. The major finding, that there is no measurable difference between the two groups in either civic engagement or self-efficacy, is not surprising. The minor finding that when you disaggregate the homeschoolers by number of years homeschooling you do find that self-efficacy declines the more years children homeschool, is interesting and important. The authors don’t provide descriptive statistics here, so we do not know how many of the sample of 42 homeschoolers had done it long-term. If the number was very small, it could be a fluke. If it’s large, it is possible that the male-female thing could be a factor. Hypothetically, girls who went to school might be more socially adept and confident than boys who stayed home for years. Or it could be the case that for older children homeschooling really is isolating.
All of those are interesting speculations, but they are just that. Had the authors provided more raw data we could at least discuss them, but they don’t, so we can’t. We have a finding that could be very significant and that does corroborate what a lot of people sort of feel in their bones about long-term homeschooling, but the data here is purely anecdotal and thus cannot be generalized to homeschoolers as such, in Israel or anywhere else.
Milton Gaither, Messiah College