Talal Younes (left) with Dr. Tyler Hodges of William Carey University (right), who presented Talal with the Senior Biology Award.I became interested in home education because while I was on the faculty at Ball State University, my best chemistry and physics students were homeschool graduates. The more I studied home education, the more clear it became to me that for most students, it produces a superior education. As a result, I started working with home educators, and eventually, I started writing curriculum for them. Over the years, I have been truly blessed to hear from homeschool graduates who have gone on to do great things in their chosen fields of study. For example, not all that long ago, I met up with Joshua Russell, an amazing homeschool graduate from Alaska. His performance in a summer college program was so impressive that he was awarded a full-ride scholarship to any school in the University of Alaska system!
Well, I recently heard from a justifiably proud parent regarding her homeschool graduate’s success. His name is Talal Younes, and the picture above shows him with one of his professors at William Carey University. The picture was taken at the Honors Day Convocation held by the university, and it shows him with the Senior Biology Award he received. This means that he was the outstanding senior biology student over the entire year. Of course, one award wasn’t enough for Talal, so he also received the Senior Chemistry Award at the same event!
As if that’s not enough, Talal’s mother was kind enough to share with me the title of his Senior Honors Thesis: “Proposal of a Novel Mechanism for Alpha-synuclein Induced Neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s Disease.” In order to receive graduation honors at William Carey University, a student must complete an honors thesis in his or her area of study. However, a student can’t just decide to do an honors thesis on his or her own. The student must be invited to do so by a faculty member who wishes to supervise the thesis. Thus, the very fact that Talal can do a Senior Honors Thesis tells you he was so impressive that a professor wanted to spend extra time and energy working with him!
I spent this past weekend speaking at the 2013 Midwest Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. The crowds were huge, and there was a lot of enthusiasm amongst both the attendees and the speakers. It seems to me that this convention was much like the conventions I remember from ten years ago: lots of enthusiastic homeschoolers listening and talking to lots of enthusiastic speakers about the joys, troubles, and triumphs of home education. It was wonderful.
I spoke a total of seven times on six different subjects. Two of my talks were given with Diana Waring, and I enjoyed them the most. She and I have different styles that seem to complement each other really well. As she puts it, I provide the “analytics,” and she provides the “warm fuzzies.” I am not sure that’s exactly right, but it’s probably close. We gave the same talks in Greenville, SC, and we will be doing them again in Springfield, Missouri and Kissimmee, Florida.
As is typically the case, the most interesting part of the conference for me was interacting with the attendees. I had a rather constant stream of parents and students coming to my booth to talk with me. Many of them asked questions, and I hope my answers provided some help. Others came by just to report on how they (or their children) were doing with my courses. I was really impressed to meet one young lady who had completed all of my textbooks! I have authored or co-authored eight texts, and most students get through five of them. Some complete six, and a very few manage to cover seven, but this young lady had gotten through all eight of them. As a result, she has already taken the equivalent of a year of university-level biology, a year of university-level chemistry, and a year of university-level physics. That’s pretty impressive!
I take questions from the audience in all of my talks, and at the end of one of my evolution-related talks, a man asked a question about abiotic oil. He had read a book by Dr. Thomas Gold entitled The Deep Hot Biosphere, which tries to make the case that both oil and coal are not fossil fuels. In other words, they are not produced by decaying dead things. Instead, they are produced by chemical processes in the earth and simply reworked by living organisms. I read that book many years ago, and while it is definitely worth reading (even today), I personally think that it really overstates the case.
Last week, I spoke at the Great Homeschool Convention in Greenville, South Carolina. It was very well attended, and other than a fire alarm that interrupted one of my talks, it ran really smoothly. I gave two brand-new talks at this convention, and they were both done with Diana Waring, whose high school history curriculum is truly wonderful.
One of these new talks was on the myths that you find in textbooks. It started off with the myth that ancient people thought the earth was flat. There is simply no truth to such an absurd idea. As early as 200 BC, natural philosophers knew the circumference of the earth, and the earliest Christian writers who mention the shape of the earth (such as Basil of Caesarea – c. 330-379) mention the spherical shape of the earth as an accepted fact. No one thought that Columbus was going to sail off the edge of the earth. His problems getting funding involved people not thinking he could carry enough supplies to make a voyage all the way around the earth. The other talk was based on a study by Dr. Harold McCurdy, which I have already discussed here.
While the talks I gave were enjoyable, as usual, the most interesting thing that happened occurred as a result of someone asking me a question. One of the solo talks I gave was called Why Homeschool Through High School. As a part of that talk, I discuss studies in which homeschool graduates are compared to graduates of traditional schools when it comes to their performance in college. Not surprisingly, the homeschooled students do much better in college than their traditionally-schooled peers.
After the talk, a homeschooling parent who is also a college professor asked me a very interesting question. He asked me if any study had attempted to measure not the performance of homeschool graduates at the college level, but instead the preparation that homeschool graduates have when they arrive at college. After all, he said, a student can perform well at the college level even when he is unprepared, as long as he has the ability to learn on his own. I told him that the studies I had seen focused on performance, but I would take another look at the literature and see what I could find.
Well, it turns out that such a study has been done. It is a PhD dissertation, which is why I hadn’t seen it in the academic literature. It was done by a student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and it at least partially addresses the question that the homeschooling parent asked.
The Home Educating Family Association is a wonderful organization that provides all sorts of useful resources to homeschoolers. They publish a magazine called (not surprisingly) Home Educating Family. Recently, they asked me to contribute to their first issue of 2013, which focuses on pro-life topics. I ended up writing two pieces for them. The first one is entitled “My Little Girl,” and it discusses our experience of adopting a teenager (who just turned 34!). It was probably the most difficult piece I have ever written, as it brought up all sorts of (mostly wonderful) memories. I had such a hard time finding the words I needed to convey what I felt, and then I had a hard time proofreading the piece because of my tears! The article is not available on the internet, so if you want to read it, you will need to get the print magazine.
The other article didn’t make it into the print magazine, so it ended up being posted on the Home Educating Family Association blog. It is essentially a composite of two blog posts I wrote previously discussing how a baby in the womb is fully human. It is not emotional, but some might find it interesting. If you care to read the piece, you can find it here.
This circus poster promoted the myth that hippos sweat blood. (Public domain image)I am currently in Thailand, speaking at a family education conference. There are a lot of incredibly wonderful families here, and not surprisingly, some of them feel a bit overwhelmed at homeschooling their children in Asia. To all those homeschoolers in the United States: be thankful for all the support that exists where you live. Home education is difficult enough when there are support groups, easy access to curriculum, and homeschooling conferences that showcase multiple speakers and vendors. Imagine trying to homeschool with without such luxuries. That’s what these families do every day.
Because I am one of the few speakers at this conference, I have been giving a lot of talks. However, my favorite thing to do is answer questions. As a result, one of my scheduled times with the parents was simply a question/answer session. It went really well, and I hope I helped these parents with their unique situations. I was also scheduled for two sessions with the teens, and I made one of them a question/answer session as well.
When you offer a one-hour time slot for questions and answers, there is always a risk. What if the attendees have no questions? What if they have a couple of questions, but not nearly enough to last for an hour? I honestly didn’t think this would be an issue for the parents, since they face so many challenges homeschooling where they are. However, I did worry about the teens. While I was sure they had lots of questions, I was afraid they wouldn’t be “brave” enough to ask them in a group setting. To reduce the risk, then, I offered free candy for every question. Not surprisingly, the teens ended up having plenty of questions.
One of the reasons I love answering questions is that I often learn something new in the process, and this conference was no exception. The second question I got from the teens was:
Using memorized arithemetic relationships seems to produce better PSAT math scores. When I am spending time with a group of homeschooling parents at conventions, homeschooling support groups, or just informal gatherings, two subjects seem to come up regularly: science and math. Of course, part of the reason for this is that I have written a series of science textbooks designed specifically with home educators in mind, and at the higher levels, those texts use a lot of math. However, I also think it is partly due to the fact that science and math tend to be the subjects with which most homeschooling parents are very uncomfortable. They are always looking for ways to “do better” when it comes to those two subjects.
When I comment on math, I always like to make it clear that I am not, in any way, a mathematician. Indeed, because many homeschooling parents requested it, I actually tried to write a mathematics program. Based on that experience, I can make one very definitive statement: While I use a lot of math in my field, I am definitely not an expert at it. When it comes to mathematics education, you need to take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, one thing I have always stressed when it comes to homeschooling is to emphasize math in the elementary years. Based on my experience with students from junior high all the way through graduate school, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to produce excellent science and mathematics students is to spend a lot of time on math in the elementary years. This not only includes learning new mathematical concepts, but it also means drilling your student in math. In my experience, the best science and math students are the ones who spent a lot of time on math drills when they were young.
An interesting study that seems to support this view was recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.1
I was recently made aware of a 2010 analysis that was done by Baylor University’s Office of Institutional Research and Testing. It compared first-time Baylor freshman who were homeschool graduates to the rest of Baylor’s first-time freshman population over a period of four years. I think the results will be helpful to those who are wondering whether or not home education adequately prepares a student for the academic rigors of university.
The first thing the analysis noted was that homeschool graduates had significantly higher SAT and ACT scores than the rest of the population. The homeschool graduates, for example, averaged 115 points higher on the SAT than the rest of the student population. While that is interesting, the really important result is how the homeschool graduates performed in their freshman year at Baylor. In the end, the average homeschool graduate had a freshman grade point average (GPA) of 3.364, while the average for the rest of the freshman class was 3.038. Here is a bar graph that illustrates this result:
Average freshman GPA's for homeschool graduates and non-homeschool graduates at Baylor University from 2005 to 2009
The black bars on the graph are called error bars, and they demonstrate the possible error that exists in such a measurement. When you study a group of people, it is always possible that the people you have studied are not quite representative of the population you are trying to understand. As a result, whatever you measure might not be an accurate measurement of the population in general. Using statistics, it is helpful to estimate how much your measurement might be in error. The crudest way to do that is to use the size of the sample you are studying as a guide. The more people you study, the more accurate your representation of the population should be. In this analysis, they had a huge population of non-homeschool graduates (14,078) but a small population of homeschool graduates (151). As a result, the error associated with the homeschool graduates is large, while the error associated with the non-homeschool graduates is small.*
In general, the way you treat error bars is to assume that the measurement can actually be anywhere within the range of the error bar. For the homeschool graduates, then, the measured average was 3.364. However, based on the error bar, it could actually be anywhere from 3.090 to 3.638. For the non-homeschool graduates, the measured average was 3.038, but it could actually be anywhere from 3.012 to 3.064. The important thing to note is that even if you take the lowest value for the homeschool graduates and the highest value for the non-homeschool graduates, the average for the homeschool graduates is still higher. This means the analysis provides strong evidence that the average homeschool graduate does better than the rest of the population during his or her freshman year at Baylor. While I find that interesting, I think a more detailed look at the data is even more interesting.
On Monday of this week, I was invited to speak at a meeting of the Kingdom Way Homeschoolers in Wadsworth, Ohio. It was held on the Wadsworth campus of the The Chapel, which was a wonderful venue. The auditorium had really excellent acoustics, and it had a nice, open feel to it. The back wall of the stage had a modern design on it, and the design was backlit with different colors. Once the technical support person (who was superb) put up my presentation, a young lady then changed the colors of the backlighting to match the color scheme of my presentation. I thought that was a very nice touch.
The title of my talk was Why Homeschool Through High School…and How to Get It Done. In the first part of the talk, I went through some data that indicate students who are homeschooled through high school are better prepared for the future than their traditionally-schooled counterparts. In the second half of the talk, I went over some “nuts and bolts” related to homeschooling at the high school level. I discussed the basic subjects that should be covered and gave some suggestions regarding how you might cover those subjects.
This particular talk was a bit longer than most of my talks, because I covered a lot of ground in it. However, the large crowd was very patient and seemed to enjoy the talk. As is typically the case, I took questions at the end of the talk, and they were quite good. There was one in particular that really got me thinking. A gentleman asked about apprenticeships and trade schools. Since my talk was focused on university preparation, I thought he was asking me to talk a bit about what to do with students who aren’t university-bound. I told him that just as I am a fan of having university-bound students take a few classes at a local college or a few AP classes to give them a preview of what university will be like, I also am a fan of having non-university-bound students do apprenticeships or take classes at a local trade school to start career exploration.
That really didn’t address his question, however. He wanted me to specifically compare the two. For a non-university-bound student, which would be better: some sort of apprenticeship or taking classes at a trade school? I had never considered that before, and I told him as much. However, I was happy to “think out loud” for him.
Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY (click for credit)
I try to keep up on all the latest research related to homeschooled students. Unfortunately, I seem to have missed a small study that was published in the summer 2008 edition of the Journal of College Admission. The study wasn’t done on homeschooled students; instead, it was done on community college admissions officers. The authors sent surveys to them, asking about their perceptions of homeschool graduates. I found several of the paper’s points rather interesting and worthy of some discussion.1
First, the paper reports on the results of another study I somehow missed. The study is a bit old (1998), but the results are worth noting. It examined the community college transcripts of 101 homeschool graduates and compared them to those of students who graduated from a traditional high school. The study found that both full-time and part-time homeschool graduates had significantly higher grade point averages (GPAs) than their peers. In addition, the study examined the results of the Texas Academic Skills Program, a test that all students who attend state-funded, post-secondary educational institutions in Texas are required to take. The test covers reading, writing, and mathematics. Once again, the homeschool graduates achieved significantly higher scores than their traditionally-schooled peers.2
Second, the paper discusses the admissions process for homeschool graduates at community colleges. It notes that only 50% of those that responded to the survey have an official policy regarding the admissions process for homeschool graduates. That surprised me. After all, you would think that community colleges would cater to nontraditional students, and homeschooled students are clearly nontraditional. Also, many homeschooling families are looking for ways to make college more affordable, since they generally have a number of children. As a result, you would think that community colleges would be a natural choice for many homeschool graduates. It seems to me, then, that it would be natural for the vast majority of community colleges to have an official policy regarding how homeschool graduates should be admitted.
Now while only 50% of the responding colleges had an official policy for the admission of homeschool graduates, 80% said that they had procedures in place that would allow for the admission of such students. Thus, even without an official policy, some community colleges still make it possible for homeschool graduates to be admitted. That’s good news, of course, but it makes me wonder why a school that allows for the admission of homeschool graduates doesn’t have an official policy regarding how that should be done!
Joshua Russell and MeI just got back from speaking with homeschoolers in six different Alaskan cities (Fairbanks, Kenai, Kodiak, Wasilla, Anchorage, and Juneau). In each city, I gave the same two talks: Homeschooling: Discovering How and Why It Works and Life is Amazing. I gave the first talk in the morning, and it was really for parents. However, there were some students in the morning sessions, and for the most part, they seemed to stay awake. The second talk was in the afternoon, and it was really for the students, but there were a lot of parents as well. Everyone enjoyed it, because I showed some amazing animations and videos (you can find links to them in the PDF linked above) and discussed in detail the science behind what the videos were showing.
Lots of great things happened during my time in Alaska, but two of them really stand out in my mind. In the morning talks, I showed several studies that indicate homeschooled students excel, both academically and socially. After I showed these data, I tried to offer some explanations as to why homeschoolers excel. You can see those reasons in the PDF file linked above. However, I also asked the audience to come up with their own ideas as to why homeschoolers tend to excel. I got many excellent replies, but I want to highlight one of them.
A homeschooling father mentioned a study that was done in 1957 by psychologist Dr. Harold McCurdy. What the father said about the study intrigued me, so I looked it up. The author investigated the lives of twenty geniuses like John Stuart Mill, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Blaise Pascal. He wanted to see if he could find commonalities in their lives that might have aided their intellectual development. Who knows how effective such a study is, but I found his conclusions to be very interesting. Here is what he said:1
In summary, the present survey of biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical development pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and (3) a rich efflorescence of phantasy, as a reaction to the two preceding conditions.
By “phantasy,” the good doctor just means “imaginative play.”
Now as I said, I am not sure how effective such a study really is, so I don’t take these results to be conclusive by any means. However, what he describes sounds an awful lot like a homeschool! Homeschooled children are given a high degree of attention from their loving parents, often in the form of intensive educational endeavors. While not completely isolated from children outside the family, homeschooled students certainly have less contact with their peers than do non-homeschooled students. Finally, most homeschoolers I know severely limit the amount of television that their children can watch, which encourages imaginative play. In the end, then, it seems that homeschooling naturally provides a lot of what Dr. McCurdy thinks is necessary for the development of genius.
