{"id":440,"date":"2012-11-27T13:12:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T13:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=440"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:26:55","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:26:55","slug":"linking-parental-motivations-comparing-parents-who-homeschool-with-those-who-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=440","title":{"rendered":"LINKING PARENTAL MOTIVATIONS: Comparing Parents who Homeschool with Those who Don’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record: <\/strong>Christa L. Ice and Kathleen V. Hoover-Dempsey, \u201cLinking Parental Motivations for Involvement and Student Proximal Achievement Outcomes in Homeschooling and Public Schooling Settings\u201d in Education and Urban Society<\/em> 43, no. 3 (May 2011): 339-369. [Abstract available here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Summary: <\/strong>Hoover-Dempsey and Ice ask two questions in this article.\u00a0 First, are there important differences between how parents who choose homeschooling view their abilities to teach, level of engagement with their kids, and perception of their kids\u2019 capabilities, and how parents who choose public schools for their kids view the same variables?\u00a0 Second, do the differences in parental perception lead to differences in student performance and self-image?<\/p>\n

the original design of the study was to get two sample groups, one of homeschooling dyads (a mother and a homeschooled child) and the other of public schooling dyads (a mother and a public schooled child).\u00a0 The researchers wanted to compare the groups on a survey they constructed and then do it again six months later to see if the differences between the two groups of parents had led to any measurable change in student self-concept.\u00a0 Both groups, it must be noted, were convenience samples of volunteers recruited by advertisements and mailings.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Ice and Hoover-Dempsey, not enough of their original subjects returned the second round of surveys to be able to make meaningful comparisons.\u00a0 For the first round they got 30 public school and 34 homeschool dyads.\u00a0 For the second round though, only 33 total returned the survey.\u00a0 Thus their original intent for the study was thwarted.\u00a0 But the authors tried to regroup and salvage the study by taking it in other directions.<\/p>\n

They shifted focus from a longitudinal look at how parental attitudes impact students to comparisons between the two groups from the first study alone.\u00a0 Without going into all the details about their complex terminology and survey design, I\u2019m going to just summarize here what they found.<\/p>\n

Basically, both groups of parents reported themselves as being very involved in their children\u2019s educations, so much so that it was harder for Ice and Hoover-Dempsey to make distinctions between the two groups than I think they expected.\u00a0 In their words, \u201cboth samples of parents were comprised of apparently highly active and highly involved parents.\u201d (p. 361)<\/p>\n

There were a few differences though.\u00a0 Homeschooling parents tended to think more highly of their own abilities to teach their children than public school parents, tended to have stronger support networks for helping them do this, and tended to think more highly of their children\u2019s abilities.<\/p>\n

The children themselves, however, didn\u2019t display much of any differences at all.\u00a0 Said differently, while homeschooling parents THINK their kids are different than public school kids in terms of their interest in schooling, their strategies for success, and their confidence, in fact when Ice and Hoover-Dempsey asked the kids themselves, they found both groups to be the same. Ice and Hoover-Dempsey summarize, \u201cpublic discussion often seems to assume homeschool children are different than public school children\u2026. However, the most important difference might not lie within the children, but rather in the parents who make the school choice decision.\u201d (p. 362)<\/p>\n

Again, this was not what Ice and Hoover-Dempsey had expected to find.\u00a0 I think they were hoping to find, through their longitudinal study, that six months\u2019 time of exposure to homeschooling parents that were more highly motivated, more committed to their kids, and more deeply embedded in rich social networks would have produced a measurable positive effect on homeschooled children.\u00a0 Instead, they found that the differences between public and homeschooling parents weren\u2019t really that pronounced and that homeschooling parents\u2019 inflated sense of their children\u2019s abilities and efforts were not shared by the children themselves.<\/p>\n

What accounts for homeschooling parents\u2019 excessively positive appraisal of their children?\u00a0 Ice and Hoover-Dempsey speculate that it might be due to homeschooling parents\u2019 felt need to justify their actions to a still skeptical outside population.\u00a0 They cite no evidence for this claim, however.<\/p>\n

Appraisal:\u00a0<\/strong> To me the only real take-home messages here (other than the fact that longitudinal studies are very hard to perform successfully) are that among committed parents, the similarities between those who choose home and those who choose public schooling are more important than the differences, and that despite what homeschooling parents might think, their children are really not that different from kids in public schools whose parents are really committed to their educations.<\/p>\n

The real problem with the study, aside from the failure to get good longitudinal data, is the sampling method.\u00a0 When you\u2019re relying on volunteers who responded to a flyer in a library of course you\u2019re going to get the most highly motivated parents.\u00a0 It\u2019s just a bad research design to think that you can rely on volunteers and then be able to make valid inferences about the differences between two populations.\u00a0 Are homeschooling parents and public schooling parents in the broader society on average as similar as these two sample groups were?\u00a0 Who knows?\u00a0 But this study really doesn\u2019t help us answer that question at all, and it makes whatever conclusions they reach about their two sample groups pretty meaningless.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Christa L. Ice and Kathleen V. Hoover-Dempsey, \u201cLinking Parental Motivations for Involvement and Student Proximal Achievement Outcomes in Homeschooling and Public Schooling Settings\u201d in Education and Urban Society 43, no. 3 (May 2011): 339-369. [Abstract available here] Summary: Hoover-Dempsey … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19,13],"tags":[387,389,388],"class_list":["post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parental-motivation","category-public-schools","tag-christa-l-ice","tag-education-and-urban-society","tag-kathleen-v-hoover-dempsey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1132,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions\/1132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}