I find it deeply disturbing that people point to the success of students in science fairs, as a measure of local science education. I've been a judge at several science fairs, and I've come to the conclusion that science fairs are an anti-education tool -- they represent the worst of the American educational system.
First of all, there is nothing democratic about science fairs. Some schools (very few) require every student in a particular grade to develop and submit a science fair project. However the majority of the entrants at a science fair are selected by their teachers, or self-selected. The kids who already like science, already know they are good at it, choose to participate. I'm glad they have an outlet for their interests, but the existence of a science fair does nothing for the scientific education of the majority.
Second, science fair prizes are in reality awarded to the parents of the student. During the science fair, as a judge I get to interview the students about their projects. One science fair project involved shooting arrows from different distances into a target and measuring how far they penetrated. "How did you come up with the idea for using arrows?" "My dad bow hunts". Pity the kids whose fathers don't have interesting hobbies. At another fair a student showed the results of running ketchup through a centrifuge. How did she get access to a centrifuge (something most elementary schools don't have on hand)? Her mother works at a national lab, with, guess what, centrifuges. Another student wrote software to analyze images from astronomy. Guess what his father does -- right, he works at a national lab writing software for astronomy. In none of these cases am I actually accusing the parent of doing the work -- I merely point out that the child of the janitor, the secretary, the farmer, is laboring under an enormous handicap. When they cast about in their daily life for an experiment, it is unlikely they will come up with anything so dramatic. Odyssey of The Mind (some states have s sister program Destination ImagiNation), a very different science enrichment program, has gone to great lengths to even the playing field. Teams have a strict budget, and even if the parents can give the team equipment, the fair-market cost of "free" items is required to be included in the budget. Judges question the students intensely, and evidence that a parent, rather than children, shaped a project results in demotions. Science fair makes no attempt to level the playing field. One year I partnered with an elementary school teacher. She picked a few bright kids who were not children of scientists, and I matched them with (childless) volunteer scientists, whose job was to play the role of the scientific parent, suggesting error bars, negotiating equipment loans, helping with library research.
The one project within reach of most children is what I will call "the out of control collection". Students in need of a project pick something they think they would like to study. Bugs, plants, coins, etc. They start small, then the project gets rolling, and they are sucked in by their interests. It is the persistence and enthusiasm of a child (rather than the Ph.D. level of the parent) which determines the difference between a sloppy notebook with five dead plants and six beautifully indexed three-ring binders with pressed flowers. Sadly, none of these child-scale projects are eligible to win. Science fairs require projects to be run according to deductive reasoning. The child is supposed to come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, and then prove or disprove the hypothesis. I was taught myself that "this is what real scientists do". Only, a Ph.D. and many successful research projects later, I have to say, the emperor has no clothes. There are times in my research, in famous Nobel Prize winners research, when one poses a hypothesis, and tests that hypothesis. However, many extremely important discoveries depended on the existence of the "out of control collection". Kepler discovered the true motions of the planets around the sun because he had Tycho Brae's wonderful, precise, collection of planetary motions. The HR diagram, which describes the life cycle of stars, was created by Henry Norris Russel. However Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the other Harvard Observatory "computers" (most of them women) laid the ground work by analyzing thousands of stars. In the process of creating this magnificent collection Leavitt realized that the sorting of stars (ABCDEF...) was out of order. She re-ordered them (giving astronomy students a headache trying to remember OBAFGKM), which led directly to the HR diagram. In my experience, interest and passion drives scientists to collect data. Familiarity and an analytic approach to the collected data suggests a hypothesis (more often several), and only then can "experiments" be run to tease out the scientific fundamentals. Dmitri Mendeleev did not invent the periodic table by coming up with a hypothesis that elements should be laid out in rows and then testing it. He collected information about known elements on notecards. He became very familiar with them and sorting them out one day, like setting up a game of solitaire, he realized there was a graphical pattern, which allowed one to predict the qualities of an element by it's position in the graph. This realizing, discovering, the "light bulb going off", is the core of science, and it is built on a careful collection and an easy familiarity with the collection. "Out of control collections" following their interests are an excellent way for children to enter the world of science.
Finally, when average students are exposed to science fairs, they receive a strong message that science is not for them. It reminds me very much of stock-picking contests. In a stock picking contest each member of a class "invests" a set amount of money, then they follow the stock market for a few weeks or month (the amount of time available during the semester). The students whose portfolios do the best are not the highest quality stocks, or the best balanced portfolios, but the outliers -- 100% invested in penny stocks which through a stroke of luck doubled. In a similar manner, the average middle school student wandering through a science fair sees only very complex projects, projects they would never be able to come up with (not having those PhD parents). These projects are highly polished, often they are the work, not of a month, but several years, being presented for the second or third time. The science is presented as if the hypothesis dropped out of the blue, and funny that, the hypothesis is almost always true -- science fair projects that disprove a hypothesis are unlikely to get prizes. "I guessed that when I dropped the rock, it would fall straight up". This serves as a poor introduction to scientific thought, a poor example of how science is actually done -- it is an anti-education in science for 99% of students.
I will say I have seen one science fair project that gave me hope for the future. The student (him or her, names were concealed for judging) had gone to the grocery store and purchased food coloring and food flavorings. He or she had then cross-mixed the food flavoring and colors with water, so that lemon-flavored water was red, and strawberry-flavored water was blue. The student then gave the water to friends and family to taste and asked them to identify the flavor. Data was kept carefully, with age and sex noted. The hypothesis sprung from the first few "experiments" -- Which is stronger, flavor or color? (Oh right, not a hypothesis, cannot be falsified). It turns out that red is a dominate color -- red things, regardless of actual flavor, are identified as cherry/strawberry. Citrus (lemon/orange) is the strongest flavor -- people can identify it even if it is blue or purple. But when citrus flavored liquids are red, the red wins. People still call it cherry or strawberry. This project was the correct scale for an elementary school science fair -- it was low cost, required no equipment or expertise the average child couldn't get their hands on. The student had clearly learned a lot, and followed a very standard scientific thought process: play, collect, suspect, develop hypothesis, test. And that carefully collected data contained another surprise: Children under the age of five are much better at detecting mis-colored flavors -- but even they are thrown off by red.
Can science fairs be saved?
- Science fair projects need to be judged on the distance the student has traveled rather than the shoulders of giants the child has to stand on.
- Second and third year projects should be forbidden. Middle school and high school are not appropriate times to specialize and polish a paper for publication -- students who place one year should be required to find a totally different field of study the next year -- maybe the child of the engineer will LOVE biology.
- When science fairs are part of classroom enrichment, children should be formally assigned scientist partners -- this gets childless scientists into the classroom, provides mentors for kids, and opens everyone's horizons.
- Rather than being "winner take all", there should be a threshold for science fair prizes, after which everyone takes a blue ribbon. Every student should be capable, with support, diligence, and hard work, of taking a blue ribbon.
- "Collections gone wild" should be an approved and awarded option -- developmentally appropriate for not only children, but fully grown scientists.
- Correct scientific thought goes like this: interest, collect, play, suspect, hypothesize (more than one), experiment. To which I would add, fail, rebound, and take advantage of limitations. Odyssey of the Mind gives out an award for the best idea that totally bombed. It is named Ranatra Fusca after a team that tried to build a water skating insect -- which sank like rock.
