Do Homeschool – or All School – Parents and Children Need to Shake a Leg?

 

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The Context

Homeschooling has grown to now engage around 2.5 million K-12 students and their just-over 1 million families. Research on homeschool students’ academic performance, social and emotional development, and success in adulthood shows, by and large, that the home educated are doing very well compared to their institutionally schooled peers (Ray, 2017).

Now there is an emerging research base on the physical health of the homeschooled. Overall, there have been no drastic differences found between the health of the homeschooled and the public schooled. In 2019, Dr. Laura Kabiri and her colleagues concluded the following: “Parents and policy makers should not be concerned with detrimental physical health effects of homeschooling on youth” (p. 1). In a recent study, however, researchers Kabiri, Brice, Rodriguez, Perkins-Ball, and Diep (2020) found some things that should gain attention from the homeschool community.

 

Methods

The purpose of the investigators’ “… study was to compare the health-related fitness including body mass index [BMI], cardiorespiratory fitness, and muscular fitness between homeschool and public school adolescents” (p. 2). Because not much is known about the subject, Kabiri and her colleagues hypothesized that there would be no differences between homeschool adolescents and public school adolescents.

It was a cross-sectional study; that is, it took a point-in-time descriptive look at two groups of students and was not designed to establish cause and effect. The two groups were homeschool children ages 12-17 years old who had completed at least one year of homeschool and local school district adolescents aged 12–17 years as the public school comparison group. Public school campus-specific data

were accessed and then public school students were randomly selected to create 66 homeschool and public school pairs matched on age and sex.

The authors used independent t-tests to analyze differences in BMI as well as the estimated VO2max and total number of curl-ups and 90° push-ups. They used Chi-square tests to determine differences in FitnessGram® classification for cardiorespiratory fitness classifications (healthy, needs improvement, needs improvement health risk) and for abdominal and upper body strength and endurance classifications (healthy, needs improvement).

 

Findings

There was no significant difference in BMI between the homeschool and public school groups. There was no difference between the two school-type groups on the mean number of 90° push-ups. The public school students executed significantly more curl-ups.

Regarding cardiorespiratory fitness, the scholars noted that “… 12 public school students took longer than the maximum allotted time of 13 minutes to complete

the 1-mile run …” (p. 3) and this disqualified them from data analysis for this portion of the data analysis. Also, one homeschool adolescent declined to complete this portion of testing. With these missing data in mind, the public school students scored significantly better on the mean VO2max estimation.

Regarding various factors, there were mixed results between homeschool and public school students in categories of healthy versus needs improvement or needs improvement-health risk.

 

Summary

This study is a cross-sectional, point-in-time descriptive study of certain aspects of health-related fitness comparing a group of homeschool adolescent students with a group of public school adolescent students. On some measures, there were no statistical differences between the two school groups; on other measures, there were differences. Considering the fact that about 18% of the public school students took longer than the maximum time to complete the 1-mile run and were therefore not included in the cardiorespiratory VO2max test, it seems that this comparison between public school and homeschool does not offer much usable information (see, e.g., limitations mentioned on page 4).

On several measures, there were no differences between the two groups. The key finding of difference on a tangible manifestation of fitness, it appears, was regarding comparisons of muscular strength and endurance. There was no difference on push-ups but the public schooled did more curl-ups. The authors reported that the difference indicates that the homeschooled had weaker abdominal strength.

This may be because public school students may wear backpacks weighing up to 25% of their body weight daily, which engages the core stabilizing muscles. It is also worth noting that several homeschool students requested for their feet to be held during test administration. The FitnessGram® curl-up test must be completed without any assistance, therefore practicing the skill with this additional assistance would elicit poorer test administration in the absence of this help. (p. 4)

Kabiri and her associates astutely recognized some possibilities that homeschool students do not know the institutional standardized ways of doing certain physical fitness activities. The researchers noted that this may have affected their performance.

Overall, this study and its findings raise some questions. First, are there major differences between the health-related fitness of public school and homeschool students? At this point in research history, studies do not substantiate notable differences. Some studies by Kabiri and her colleagues have found differences between homeschool and public school students but the studies’ designs, as the researchers note, are cross-sectional and do not employ statistical controls of background variables that would establish authentic differences or a causal relationship between type of schooling and fitness. A quick review of studies cited by Kabiri et al. (2020) reveals that, in design, they are descriptive and not predictive or explanatory (Johnson, 2001). Consistent with this, the researchers in the present study were clear that this investigation was cross-sectional and descriptive and there was no attempt to establish cause-and-effect regarding any differences between the public school and homeschool students. Several more background and variable controls need to be put into place in future studies to approach discussing cause and effect. It would be advantageous to see Dr. Kabiri and her colleagues do this.

A second question might be, is there any evidence that homeschool parents and children should be paying attention to and working on their physical fitness? It appears that there is some. Considering that 63% of American adults were obese (30%) or overweight (33%) in 2015 (United States Department of Health and Human Services, 2015) and that “[e]xcess weight, especially obesity, diminishes almost every aspect of health, from reproductive and respiratory function to memory and mood” (Harvard School of Public Health, n.d.), parents and their children in general – whether in public schools, private schools, or homeschools – need to work on their lifelong physical fitness. In addition, since there is no compelling research evidence to date that homeschool children are exhibiting above-average health-related fitness, both their parents and they should shake a leg and put appropriate focus on working to be physically fit.

--Brian D. Ray, Ph.D.

National Home Education Research Institute

 

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Keywords, Categories, Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, public school, health education, physical fitness, physical education, health, peer-reviewed, comparison.

 

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Copyright © 2019 by Brian D. Ray

 

References and Endnotes:

Harvard School of Public Health. (n.d.). Health risks: Weight problems take a hefty toll on body and mind.  Retrieved February 20, 2020 from https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-consequences/health-effects/

Johnson, Burke. (2001). Toward a new classification of nonexperimental quantitative research. Educational Researcher, 30(2), 3-13.

Kabiri, Laura S.; Brice, Kendall R.; Rodriguez, Augusto X.; Perkins-Ball, Amanda M.; & Diep, Cassandra S. (2020). Health-related fitness in homeschool versus public school adolescents. Retrieved February 19, 2020 from https://doi.org/10.1080/19325037.2020.1713261

Kabiri, Laura S.; Butcher, Allison; Brewer, Wayne; and Ortiz, Alexis. (2019). Youth physical health and years in American homeschools: Are they related? Health Promotion International, 2019, 1–6. Available February 20, 2020 from https://academic.oup.com/heapro/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/heapro/daz047/5492359

Ray, Brian D. (2017). A systematic review of the empirical research on selected aspects of homeschooling as a school choice. Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform, 11(4), 604-621. Retrieved February 20, 2020 from https://www.nheri.org/a-systematic-review-of-the-empirical-research-on-selected-aspects-of-homeschooling-as-a-school-choice/

United States Department of Health and Human Services. (2015). Summary of health statistics. Retrieved February 20, 2020 from https://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/NHIS/SHS/2015_SHS_Table_A-15.pdf

United States Department of Health and Human Services. (2020, retrieved). Physical activity guidelines for Americans. Retrieved February 20, 2020 from https://www.hhs.gov/fitness/be-active/physical-activity-guidelines-for-americans/index.html

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