The purpose of the study was to give a description of the curricula and methods used in the home schools of home educators and to evaluate by means of case studies the effects of home education upon those included in the study.Chapter I presented an overview of the background and significance for the study and five research questions which were addressed by the study. The questions were:1. Will students being educated in the home be able to obtain academic achievement at comparable levels with those students being educated in the public school? 2. Will students being educated in the home be able to show at least one years' gain in academic achievement when scores of the previous year are compared with scores from the current year?3. What curricula and methods are being used in the home education of the children included in the study?4. What attitudes and values motivated the parents in the study to home educate their children?5. What legal actions, if any, did the parents included in the study face as a result of their choice to home educate?Chapter II provided a review of related literature. Reviewed were: compulsory attendance laws, related court decisions, and research related to home education.Chapter III presented the plan of organization and procedures used in gathering, reporting, and summarizing the data.Chapter IV contained the data collected from the four home educators. The data were presented in narrative form and in tables for each family case study.Chapter V presented a summary of the case studies, answers to research questions, observations, and recommendations. The data provided the following answers to the five research questions:1. Forty percent of the home educated students scored equal to the median national score.2. Students showed inconsistencies in average gains for the year.3. Three of the four families used curriculum materials commercially prepared for home educators.4. The parent educators appeared motivated by socialization concerns and desires for values training.5. Legal action was taken against one of the four families in the study.

Access to abstract permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Ideologue, pedagogue, pragmatic : homeschooling factions take shape on the national stage, 1970s-2010 -- Building a homeschool movement in Indiana and Delaware County, 1980-2010 -- Homeschooling at the grassroots : an ethnography of selected practitioners in Delaware County, 2001-2010. / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Department of History

This study surveyed a nationwide sample of home-schooling parents and their children and investigated two questions: (1) What are the differences in instructional approaches used by home-schooling parents? (2) Is the creativity of home-schooled children related to differences in the instructional approach? Instructional approaches were assessed by the Home Schooling Instructional Survey (HSIS), a self-report questionnaire developed for this study and completed by the home-schooling parent. Creativity of home-schooled children was measured by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking - Figural Form A (TTCT). Significant differences in instructional approach were found in four primary areas: goal orientation, autonomy, motivational orientation, and instructional format. These instructional factors were significantly related (p<.05) to the number of children being home schooled, the prior schooling experiences of the children, the parents' motivation for home schooling, and relationship with a home study school. Creativity scores were found to be positively correlated (p<.05) with the number of years the child had spent in conventional schools, household income, and the home teacher's age and educational level, but negatively correlated (p<.05) with years of home schooling. / Ed. D.

Social reform in the 1960's initiated growth in two seemingly separate educational movements in response to dissatisfaction with the traditional positivistic education system. These two movements, writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) and homeschooling, share pedagogy and methodology based upon social epistemology, and they share two teaching techniques stemming from this methodology: collaboration and writing. While homeschooling was the successful method of education for centuries, the last two centuries have seen an evolution through the one-room schoolhouse to present day positivistic educational institutions. Language-centered teaching techniques have existed as long, beginning with such educators as Isocrates and continuing with such educators as Aristotle, Quintilian, Augustine, Erasmus, George Campbell, and Fred Newton Scott, and during the past two decades, WAC proponents have incorporated the use of collaboration and writing as instruments of learning in every discipline. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of these teaching techniques in existing WAC programs because of the number of variables involved. These techniques were measured in a homeschool situation, however, where the variables could be controlled. This ethnographic study, which took place during the Spring 1994 semester with three ninth-grade female students placed in a homeschool situation, used both quantitative and qualitative methods to measure the effectiveness of collaboration and writing in all disciplines. Pre-tests revealed that, at the beginning of this study, these three students performed at very different levels of ability ; regardless of ability, however, each experienced dramatic increases in learning. The quantitative measures, Wechsler Individual Achievement Test and Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test, revealed unprecedented gains in math reasoning, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, oral expression, written expression, language composite, and critical thinking skills. These pre/ post-tests, triangulated with assessment of reading journals, daily journals, individual essays, collaborative essays, and video-taped sessions, produced a narrative which describes each student's characteristics, learning style and response to these learning/teaching methods. The results imply that homeschool education has been successful due to collaboration and writing. Furthermore, this study strongly suggests that collaboration and writing effect learning in all disciplines and recommends restructuring of traditional education to implement these teaching/learning techniques. / Department of English