August 21, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 1995 Vol. 4 No. 1
Measuring Up
Sidebar for Home Learning, Technology, and Tomorrow's Workplace
As a group, home schoolers tend to score higher than their peers on standardized achievement tests. A study completed in 1991 by the Psychological Association considered the standardized test scores used to measure whether children were meeting grade-level expectations. The Association analyzed the scores of 5,124 home-schooled students from all 50 states and in grades K–12 and found that they ranked 18 to 28 percentile points above public school averages for reading, math, and language arts. An analysis of data from the spring 1994 Iowa Tests of Basic Skills by Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Oregon, revealed similar results. The more than 16,000 home-schooled children from all 50 states in grades K–12 who completed the tests resulted in a nationwide average for home-schooled students in the 77th percentile on the Basic Battery, 79th percentile for reading, 73rd percentile for math, and 73rd percentile for language.
State-by-state analyses, however, reveal more mixed, but generally positive, results. A 1985 analysis by the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction found that the average scores state home schoolers were at the 62nd percentile in reading, 53rd percentile in math, and the 56th percentile in language. Public high school counselor Jon Wartes tracked the SAT scores of hundreds of Washington state home-schooled children in grades K-12 for several years. In reports published annually from 1987 through 1990, and available from the Washington Home school Research Project in Woodinville, Wartes found that home schooners consistently scored above the national average in reading, language, math, and science, with a median score at about the 67th percentile. Other studies have resulted in similar findings, with the home educated in Montana averaging, at the 72nd percentile, in North Dakota at about the 85th percentile, and in Oklahoma at the 88th percentile.
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