Rethinking High-School Science Fairs

At a certain point, when enough data has come in, you have to acknowledge your experiment has failed. The competitive high school science fair machine keeps churning — one of the largest competitive fairs runs more than 350 feeder fairs and offers over $9 million in annual prizes — but science fairs have drifted a long way from their original purpose. They no longer serve elite or ordinary students well. Science fairs should be about formation to think as a scientist, not about students attaching themselves, remora-like, to prestigious labs. Internships have their place in professional training and career planning, but a science fair should channel students’ competitive and exploratory energies in a more thoughtful direction.

In 2007 (my senior year), I went to two major national science fairs. I brought my double-stacked trifold poster boards to Albuquerque, New Mexico for the International Science and Engineering Fair, and I flew down to Huntsville, Alabama for the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium sponsored by the Department of Defense. Wherever I went, I had a story to tell about how potential targets for future prostate cancer drugs could work synergistically with rapamycin. According to all the adults, my peers and I were among the best of the best. But I didn’t believe them.

Wherever I went, I saw plenty of familiar faces. I went to public school on Long Island, and like many of my classmates, I spent the summer before senior year doing an internship in a professional lab. I went to work at Cold Spring Harbor, a lab I’d visited before for summer camps I genuinely enjoyed. As a middle schooler, I’d transfected bacteria with plasmids and made them glow. While we waited for gels to run, we’d use pipettes to joust on rolly chairs. I was grateful for the opportunity (and even more grateful for my mother, who drove me there and back throughout the summer and nearly every weekend), but I felt very far from being a scientist.

In my lab placement, I didn’t make any choices. I was plugged into an existing experiment and learned to infect cells, split them, let them grow, and lyse them to harvest their DNA and eventually run them through PCR to see which cells were missing. Which genes (if any) that we messed with caused these cells to die when exposed to rapamycin but left healthy cells standing? It’s a good question for someone to ask, but it’s not one that makes much sense if your goal is for a high schooler to develop their own ability to make sense of the world around them.

As I was travelling and presenting, I knew which of my classmates I’d left behind. Marc had spent the year working on surveying classmates about whether they were getting the new HPV vaccine or not. He was genuinely interested in the question as an aspiring doctor. He wrote his own survey instrument. He was going nowhere, and everyone knew it.

For JSHS, only two students were selected from our fair from all the categories. Small sample cancer vaccine surveys were never going to beat wet bench cancer research. The next year, Marc was in a lab, plugged into a project like most of the rest of us. But in the year he was planning his own experiment, he was much more of a scientist than many of his competitors. He was passing every part of the test that professor of science education William F. McComas proposed to assess a student’s depth of inquiry: 

1. Who proposed the problem?
2. Who designed the research method?
3. Who makes sense of the data?

If the student is responsible for all three tasks, there is little doubt that the activity involves high-level inquiry.

McComas was right to think that the success of a science fair should be judged by how much it asked students to reason as scientists do. There are other real goods that can come from interning or shadowing in a professional lab, but it’s a mistake to imagine it’s an introduction to deep, critical thinking. A student needs more room to stumble than joining an existing project allows. 

At America’s first science fairs, many of the competitors would have looked like Marc. The earliest exhibits were student-driven and didn’t need to be at the bleeding edge of a field. In the 1920s and 1930s, science educator Morris Meister founded and formalized science fairs for the students of New York City. Meister argued that the practical experiments and demonstrations of his fairs were a necessary compliment to classroom instruction. Science education and science fairs should “enable our pupils to appreciate the methods of science and to use this method and the thinking procedure of science in their every-day lives,” Meister argued. 

These early student science fairs were a complement to industrial fairs where companies showed off new inventions like the telegraph and the Singer sewing machine. Many of the early student science fair divisions had an agricultural and biological focus. Students might prepare a cage of living insects, exhibit plaster casts they collected of animal tracks, or offer their attempt at “the best and most original notebook or record book” for a particular organism. (This last would not have been far from the nature study journals proposed by the British 19th century education reformer Charlotte Mason, since embraced by modern homeschoolers).

These projects were a long way from the carefully composed Hypothesis, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Further Study sections of our contemporary tri-boards. The students, as amateurs, would have been a long way from knowing enough to formalize a hypothesis. These fairs directed students toward the first skills every scientist must have: observation and curiosity.

For students in lower grades, Meister proposed exhibit categories that drew on their capacity for play. Elementary schoolers were encouraged to illustrate laws of physics using Erector sets or Tinkertoys. Older children were encouraged to embrace a blend of science and home economics, with prizes for “displays of homemade useful commodities, such as soaps, dyes, candles, inks … ” Science and home ec both offered ways for children to understand the material world, and let its properties inform their deliberate choices. Young students could rework a recipe due to rationing or plan out reagents for a chemical reaction. As long as the world around them was tractable, they could fiddle with it, iterate, and improve. 

Meister’s New York fairs soon began to spread nationwide. As they became more popular, the fairs were given multiple, possibly conflicting goals. They could help students make sense of a rapidly changing, further industrializing world. They could engage the struggling students who were now expected not to drop out of high school, but were seen at risk of juvenile delinquency. And they could strengthen American science education for the purpose of improving America’s military readiness. 

This last concern came to dominate American science fairs during and after World War II. Fairs were structured with the goal of identifying the next generation of powerhouse researchers, instead of — as Meister originally hoped — forming a broad swathe of students for thoughtful citizenship. The Westinghouse Science Talent Search, established in 1942 (today called Regneron STS, the country’s oldest and most prestigious science fair) sifted applicants from around the country to 40 finalists. The winners were flown to Washington D.C., where they were feted and also encouraged to embark on science as national service.

“For the good of the nation, the ablest men should be trained,” M. H. Trytten, the director of the National Research Council’s Office of Scientific Personnel declared in 1945. When it came to science education, Trytten argued, “The fact that each individual so trained is thereby better off personally is secondary.” The STS competition selected finalists through a series of academic filters. Students needed to pass an aptitude test and have a panel judge their academic record as outstanding before anyone looked at their experiments. 

The STS competition still relies on a holistic package of research and academic achievement, even if it no longer administers its own aptitude tests. Today, however, the emphasis on public service has been replaced with a laser-focus on college applications. While the earliest science fairs directed the students to attempt to illuminate something about the world, modern competitive fairs direct the student to use science as a form of self-promotion. Students entering STS and other nationally competitive science fairs have learned that the critical hypothesis they must prove is “I’m better than my classmates.”

Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer. I remember in my high school physics class we were first taught the value of Earth’s gravitational constant g, and then asked to perform an experiment that should reveal it.

Of course, working with cruder tools, limited patience, and air resistance, many of us didn’t wind up squarely on 9.8 m/s². One of my partners was quick to scribble out our actual observation, and she and I had a brief struggle over control of the pencil as she attempted to put in the “correct” answer. She had a better sense of the teacher’s intentions than I did. The tables that honestly reported a “wrong” result were encouraged to repeat their experiment until they got a trial that “worked.” We missed the chance to talk about how scientists reconcile noisy data. We missed the chance to run an experiment for the purpose of exploring the unknown.

Students in science fairs and adults in professional labs know the answer they’re supposed to get. A result has to be statistically significant to “count” and, just like in my physics class, students can be tempted to keep reworking their results until they get the right answer. There was no p-hacking at my research internship, but part of the education I received in a professional lab was how much the scientific process was dominated by anxiety, not curiosity. 

I had come in partway through a pre-established procedure. I genuinely admired the work being done. The team’s process for high throughput mRNA screening allowed them to test many potential drug targets in parallel. The process would surely turn up false positives, but it was the first step of sifting a haystack for needles. Eventually, some of our candidates would go on to live mouse trials. 

In the endless tedium of splitting cells, I was a little excited that this was one tiny part of the work of finding a cancer drug. It was easier for me to remain focused on the final goal because I was only in the lab for a year, and all I would get out of it personally was a science fair project. The stakes were different for the post-doc I worked under, whom I found crying in the lab one weekend. A different lab had published a paper on the mTOR pathway we were working on, one he felt anticipated some of our results and would make his work unpublishable. A year of his life was wasted. 

I was as sympathetic as I could be, but inside I was blazing with anger. It’s good news for cancer patients to have two labs independently identify a promising drug target. It shouldn’t be bad news for an individual scientist that he appears to really be onto something. I wished my supervisor could have felt proud of offering useful, corroborating data, no less valuable for coming second. I was furious that the academic system he worked in made him feel like his work was worthless. My year in the lab helped me decide against ever doing wet bench work again.

What I carried out of the lab and what enriched my life didn’t have much to do with the scientific method of “explore, wonder, hypothesize, test, repeat.” Instead, the most valuable things I learned were the virtues of reproducibility and legibility. I had very limited ability to contribute intellectually to the work I was carrying out, but I had almost unlimited potential to wreck it by mislabeling the petri dishes, forgetting to change out a pipette tip, sloppily loading the gels … or even just being lax about recording the work I did in the lab notebook that was the authoritative source of truth for the protocol. 

My internship made it clear how much work it took to do something completely consistently across many partners. Even though I wasn’t knit into the culture of the lab, I still was a little awed by the trust I was given. Long after I’d left the bench behind, I remembered how important it was not just to do something right but to do it legibly right. I haven’t smelled agar plates for almost 20 years, but I still draw on old skills every time I annotate a draft for an eventual factchecker.  

Ideally, students studying science should get to do some of the shadowing I did, to see how much slow, faithful, unpublishable work it takes to seek the truth. I was glad I did my internship; I just didn’t think it made much sense for me to take the results into competitions. At a science fair, I’d rather see students tackling their own questions, even if an adult could answer them better. A science fair should be more about giving intellectual and moral formation to the student than about pushing out the boundaries of what is known. 

Professional internships are good for students who aspire to careers in the sciences. But everyone needs a clear sense of how we seek to understand the world. Planning out a research project and then realizing you don’t have the funds to reach the sample size you need for a sufficiently powered study is a valuable education in itself. Seeing how complex, unwieldy, and expensive the scientific process is can help clarify questions like “Why has no one checked this?” or “Why don’t scientists always agree?” Realizing halfway through a project that you wish you’d set it up differently is ok. 

I’d like science fairs to be less competitive and more playful. They should give students the opportunity to lean hard into subskills of scientific literacy and informed curiosity. Fairs should be realistic that students mostly cannot execute world-class research, especially within the span of a year or two. 

So, what divisions might exist in an alternate high school science fair? What skills can students practice that will serve them well, whatever their career? What scope of work could they take on as amateurs with light mentorship, instead of being gofers in a professional lab? I’ll take the baton from Morris Meister and propose a few new divisions for regional, and even national fairs of my own:

Students submit papers and experiments that turned up no significant results. The hypotheses being tested should be plausible, and the student should be able to explain why their experiment was sufficiently powered to detect a relevant effect size. 

Best in Class Trophy: The “Blind Alley Closure” award, a gilded figure holding a WRONG WAY sign. 

Students design and do initial stress tests on an experiment that goes beyond what their own resources can sustain. A student who proposes a survey might sit down with prospective members of the population to be studied, to tape them thinking through the instrument aloud and refining it accordingly. A student with an observational study might begin exploring the inter-rater reliability of their classification system. 

Any student competing in this division would need to cost out their proposals and set up a believable timeline for data collection and analysis (and IRB placating). A few standout entries would be chosen to be funded and executed in partnership with a sponsor. 

Best in Class Trophy: The “Bases Covered” award, actually a baseball trophy with glasses added to the player sliding home. 

Two tracks here: In the first, students reproduce highly cited, seldom rerun studies from early in a field’s history. They get to operate under IRB waivers that apply only light sanity checks to prior setups. (The Stanford Prison Experiment is excluded.) Every study that was originally run only on college students (possibly receiving extra credit for a psychology course) must also be rerun on an alternate population. If the original experimental design is scanty, students should attempt to interview the original authors, and, if unable, come up with three plausible protocols. 

In the second track, students rerun the data analysis for pre-registered studies with publicly available codebooks and data. These challenges would be stratified by difficulty level and would include an oral exam on the work. 

Best in Class Trophy: The “Gimlet Eye” award, in which the top performer in each track is presented with three nearly identical trophies and is told they should take home the one that differs subtly from the other two. 

Students who enroll in this division can access a non-public tipline for questionable findings (or, of course, they can just go browsing). Successful projects surface copy-pasted Western blot lines, mathematical errors, Benford’s law distribution violations, and the like. Major deviations from preregistered analyses can also be entered in this division. 

Entries in this division are reviewed in private session. Substantial scholarships and cash bounties are awarded to findings that are judged to merit retraction (regardless of whether the journal agrees). Publicly announced winners are also awarded a defamation insurance policy by a major sponsor. 

Best in Class Trophy: The “Meddling Kids” award, which is a gilded cast of a piña colada. 

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A science fair built around subspecialties like these would reward genuine curiosity and allow students enough authorship over projects to be allowed to fail. It’s the design of an experiment, not the revelation of results that should be the most high-stakes at the high school level. My medals and ribbons have been gathering dust in the back of my childhood closet for two decades. The only thing I carry everywhere is my mind.