Springtime is science fair season. Thousands of kids across the country, from elementary through high school, spend weeks or months coaxing seedlings to grow, building devices to harness solar energy and carefully mixing acids and bases.
Often, as was certainly the case for me as an eighth grader in suburban Pennsylvania, the result is an all-hands-on-deck enterprise. Parents regularly join in the effort, helping students design their experiments and test their results — not to mention ferrying them back and forth from stores to pick up supplies.
For many, the task is stressful, but also formative. My science fair project, which involved investigating how compressing insulation affects its ability to block heat, was hardly glamorous but it was far and away the most memorable experiment of my first 13 years of school.
As educational opportunities, science fairs let students tackle the scientific method hands on. Classically that process begins with identifying a question, developing a hypothesis to answer it and then devising an experiment to test that hunch. In principle, kids who participate will not only learn about science but may also be inspired to join the next generation of scientists and engineers. But the fairs also have problems.
For starters, there’s a growing sense among some scientists and educators that many science fairs aren’t actually very good at teaching kids about, well, science. The field of science is ever changing and advancing, but the fair sticks to fairly rigid, traditional rules. Real scientific research can be observational, collaborative and creative — approaches that are sometimes verboten to science fair participants. For example, students often have to design experiments that involve manipulating a situation in some way, whereas many actual scientists, such as primatologists and astronomers, simply study their subjects over time, looking for patterns in that data.
“Jane Goodall would not have had her science fair project accepted. There’s a sort of archaic notion about how science works that’s embedded into a lot of the judging.”
“Jane Goodall would not have had her science fair project accepted,” said William McComas, a professor of science education at the University of Arkansas, at the February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “There’s a sort of archaic notion about how science works that’s embedded into a lot of the judging.”
And too often the fair is a burden on families and teachers. Jackie DeLisi, a research scientist at the Education Development Center, a Massachusetts nonprofit, has found that schools and families invest a lot of time and money in these fairs; teachers may spend as much as six weeks of class time preparing for them. Furthermore, if the fair becomes a contest between kids with financial resources and plenty of parental help, and students without access to fancy supplies or a grown-up’s guidance, it’s worth asking whether science fairs are fair.
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The good news is that some schools are conducting truly radical experiments on the science fair itself. Among the most intriguing: taking the competition out of science fairs. Under this model, students are evaluated based on their mastery of the scientific method rather than being pitted against one another.
It’s a solution that could certainly reduce stress for parents. Susan Messina is a mother in Washington, D.C., whose parody science fair poster, entitled ‘How much turmoil does the science project cause families?’ went viral a few years ago. As she wrote in a Huffington Post article: “[B]y getting rid of the stupid competition aspect, we wouldn’t have kids (or, let’s be clear, parents) competing to see who does the coolest project.”
And, argues bioethicist Frederick Grinnell of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the shift might enhance a student’s mastery and enjoyment of science. In a study published last year, Grinnell surveyed 302 students (from high school through graduate school) about their experience with science fairs. As part of his analysis, he uncovered that while the students generally enjoyed participating in science fairs, they didn’t care for the competition. “None of the kids like requiring the competitive science fair,” he said.
Grinnell even suspects that competitive science fairs might hinder learning — and there’s some research to back him up. For three decades, researchers have been scrutinizing how competition motivates student behavior. Experiments by Carol Dweck in 2003, then a professor of psychology at Columbia University, suggest that students who are driven to learn for its own sake or for personal growth tend to stick to their studies longer than their highly competitive peers. People who want to outperform others, it turns out, get an emotional boost when they succeed, but any negative feedback stymies their interest in a subject. Individuals who value learning seem to be more resilient, persisting despite failures.
Another downside to competition? It’s distracting. In a pair of studies from 2015 and 2016, Rutgers University psychologists found that competition can harm how well our memories perform. Using neuroimaging, the researchers discovered that when people in the study were told how they were doing on memory exercises relative to other participants, areas of the brain typically associated with how we think about ourselves fired up while actual memory performance weakened. “Participants are so worried about focusing on how the other person is doing they’re not adequately learning,” said Brynne DiMenichi, a research fellow and an author of both papers.
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Yet competition has its uses. It is a powerful motivator, one that many people enjoy, and, as Dweck, now at Stanford University, points out, learning how to win or lose is valuable. “It’s too extreme to say competition is never good because it also could imply we shouldn’t hold children to standards,” she said.
The best approach, argues Dweck, foregrounds the goals of learning and mastery. To do that, she says, science fair judges would evaluate student projects based on the scientific process behind them rather than the flashy final product or spectacular results. Careful interviews with each child, she says, would push students to reflect on scientific inquiry itself. By this logic, a very simple study or an experiment with negative results could still be a winner.
The model she describes resembles the “Standards-Based Science Fair,” developed by Peter Rillero, a professor of science education at Arizona State University in Phoenix. Judges evaluate budding scientists not against each other but based on their performance in certain categories: how well they form a hypothesis, for example, or analyze their data. Grinnell says this approach is now used by many schools that forgo competitive science fairs. Students who do want to push onward to district- or state-level competitions could still “opt in” to that experience, he notes.
Making science fairs noncompetitive is just one possible tweak on the classic model, but it’s a reminder that the science fair needs to be flexible to serve diverse communities. In one school DeLisi studied, for example, instructors decided to make the fair an entirely in-class project, thereby leveling the playing field for students from families with limited means. Other schools de-emphasize the scientific method entirely. They may instead prioritize students’ project management skills or focus on making science more interesting to kids by, for instance, inviting scientists to discuss their work.
“Ultimately the schools need to figure out what they want their students to get out of the experience and how to structure the fair and invest resources to achieve those goals,” DeLisi said. That process may take some trial and error — but that, too, is in the spirit of the scientific method.
As a regional coordinator for the Department of Energy’s Science Bowl, I was concerned about the inherently competitive nature of the event. There’s no way to avoid, however. So, my wife and I set about changing what we could in this double-elimination competition.
Our first change was to eliminate the elimination. All teams play to the end, but the bracket is hidden internally and seen only by the coordination staff. At the mid-point of the competition, we spent the lunch period analyzing the teams and making sure that any team that could possibly win played other such teams and that those teams not doing well would play other such teams. The important aspect of this step is that teams were not sitting on the sidelines; they were active in competition the entire day. Attendance at the final ceremonies went way up as a result.
Other Science Bowls tried penalties to prevent teams from leaving early. We refused to enact such penalties as being against the spirit of the activity and of science.
Next, we instituted a number of additional awards, some of which were voted on by the student teams and some by the volunteer judges. We had more trophies and other perks to award.
These two changes really added to our workload (a lot!) and really added to the enjoyment of the students. We always had a packed hall for the final ceremony.
The point of this little story with respect to the Science Fair is that you can change how you run an event so that everyone benefits, not just the “winners,” even if you are required to have a first-place designation who moves on to the next higher event.
My students like doing their own experimentation, based on their own interests. They are highly invested in searching for answers, They have come up with some amazing, if offbeat, questions to pursue. They look forward to sharing with their classmates. Ony to have their entrance to local ISEF fair blocked because of incomprehensible rules and procedures.
This is the main factor leading to bias towards mentored projects. The judges seem to like the “home grown” projects. However students with mentored projects have most of the “paperwork” done for them… especially if using “human subjects requiring prior approval by an IRB. The old Dont squeeze the CHARMIN test would not be accepted into the fairs today. Because it uses human subjects…. The Pepsi challenge would be mired in paperwork.. human subjects and chemicals/food items.
The word is out to my students and they won’t even consider participating in the fair. They look at the application process and just walk away. But, hey, we have some great times doing real experiments, that are safe, pertinent and engaging.
My students now gravitate towards Chemithon, Science Olympiad, etc when they want something competitive .
The column “Are Science Fairs Unfair” answered my curiosity about why science fairs seem to have disappeared from the education process, but also raised my concern about this to new heights. Our daughter, now a high school junior, was excited, enthused, enlightened and productive during elementary school when she and her friends got to design and implement experiments for the yearly science fair. Since then there has been no such opportunity. Frankly, in an attempt to make all educational opportunities “fair”, any and all opportunities to demonstrate intellectual/academic excellence have been beat down by all kinds of arguments, including many in this column. Science fairs need to return, with corrections, because continuing to ignore their value deprives all students of a great hands-on learning opportunity.
We had a science fair today and my friends were doing a booth right next to mine they ended up winning with their what substances remove sharpie stains and our science fairs are funded by the nearby high schools robotics team ROBOTICS TEAM. Now get this how did my fully made animatronic that I made ON MY OWN no help needed lose to STAINS why you might ask how? you might ask because they thought that my parents made it. It angers me so much because i new everything about it I put up footage of me building it. in the end i ended up almost punching a hole through my wall science fairs are not fair the only reason that they won was because both the people running the booth that one were on the student council