What is your topic?

Homeschooling

What is your primary research question(s)?

What is the academic achievement of homeschooled students and how are they viewed by colleges and universities?

What is your thesis (main idea) of your paper?

More and more parents are weighing the benefits of teaching their children in the comforts of their own homes, and for many reasons, they are deciding to keep their children out of the customary public or private school settings.  But what is the academic achievement of homeschooled students, and how are they viewed by college admission boards?

Briefly discuss one or two issues related to your topic that you found out through your research.

An issue that I found out through my research was the fact that homeschooled students, for the most part, do good in school, regardless of race, where there counterparts who attend regular school show a significant difference in performance based on race.  In general, in public schools, whites perform better than blacks and Mexicans on standardized tests and in school in general.   

What conclusions about your research question can be stated and supported by research in the field of education?

Through my research, I concluded that on average, homeschooled students out perform their counterparts that attend school in some sort of institution.  Any statistics from standardized tests or overall school performance from the Board of Education of any county can be compared to the statistics of the performance in that same county of homeschooled students, and they can be compared.  Based on what I found out from research, it is likely that the homeschooled students will have better grades and test scores.

Did your pre-research perceptions about your topic change as a result of your research?  If so, briefly describe how.  If not, explain how your research supported your original belief about your topic.

Prior to my research, I already had some insight about homeschooling and information about the performance of homeschooled students because my youngest sister was homeschooled for some time.  I knew that in general, homeschoolers performed better academically than public school students.  Through my research, I looked through some studies and was able to gain better knowledge on how much better homeschooled students performed, and in what aspects.  For example, as I mentioned earlier, how homeschoolers perform just as good, regardless of their race, where in public schools, whites tended to perform better than other minorities.

What one new item of knowledge or skill have you acquired as a result of this research assignment?

I found this research paper extremely challenging.  It was the first formal research paper I have ever written.  Not only did I acquire a lot of information on homeschooling, but I learned how to format a research paper.  Almost all of this was new to me, from the parenthetical citations to even the cover page.  It was a lot of hard work to organize all my research into a five page paper, and I did do a lot of procrastinating, unfortunately, which didn’t help me to finish.  In the end, I gained some experience which will help make my next research assignments easier.