Why I Love the Science Fair

My youngest child moves up from elementary school to middle school this year, which means that I’m ending my 7-year tenure as a PTA parent coordinator for her school’s science fair. People love to hate the science fair. Some of the most common critiques are that: (a) the events are unnecessarily competitive and therefore a source of stress for children, (b) that the assignment highlights resource gaps because affluent families can provide more support to their children’s projects at home, or worse buy their kids a high-quality project (!), and (c) that many of the experiments are cookie-cutter projects taken from books and aren’t actually all that interesting. Many aspects of these are true, and in fact the same critiques could be leveled at the last professional poster session that I attended: there’s competition that can make junior scientists feel bad about their work, the rich schools have better projects and more of them, and a lot of the scientific findings are pretty predictable stuff rather than ground-breaking innovations. Yet despite all that, I love the science fair. Here’s why.

First, student work is a chance to see the scientific process boiled down to its most basic elements. For a number of years my daughters would present a poster at their school's science fair, and a few weeks later I would present my own poster at the WIN nursing research conference, with each of us working on the same elements of our own scientific presentation. The basic components -- the question, hypothesis, measures, procedures, results -- are all so simple and clear in student work. That makes it easy to see how science generates knowledge, and why we should trust the findings of science. Doing it well requires an open-minded and methodical view of the world, where we follow a process and we are willing to go wherever the data lead us. A lot of student projects end with "my hypothesis was not confirmed" -- something that I wish we saw more often in professional science.

Second, science provides a venue for students to express their creativity. Public schools face constant funding cuts in other creative areas like art, music, and theater, but the public usually supports spending more on STEM education. Science is an area where kids’ natural creativity can shine through, whether that's in the selection of an interesting topic, the innovative method for conducting a study, or the artistic presentation of results. I have seen a budding naturalist's poster with beautiful hand-drawn pictures of birds; a double-blinded study to find out whether babies look like their parents; a study of academic performance to find out whether playing video games really does rot your brain; and a descriptive study of how much longer it takes to get to school on snowy mornings. (That last one presented data that I could use in my own life!) This year there was one testing the effects of different types of masks on reducing airflow. The best projects don’t follow a formula, they instead allow students to present their own ideas in their own way. Accordingly we shouldn’t grade science projects based on some predetermined set of rules, as though there were only one way to do science and any deviation from the formula is wrong. Instead, we should recognize the interplay of intuition and logic in the way that scientists develop their ideas, and reward student scientists the same way we reward adult scientists: for the value of their ideas and discoveries, and the clarity of their presentations.

Third, science is fundamentally democratic and egalitarian in its values. Even though it's easier to produce great scientific work when you have a lot of money, it's also possible to do some interesting things on a shoestring. Some kids over the years had access to state-of-the-art holographic devices or robots, and those were fun and interesting. But the most memorable ones were often done with materials found lying around the house, like a "flying doll" experiment where a girl tested the effects of friction by hurling her doll down a track on a rolling skateboard with various surface coverings. In the professional science realm, one of my most recent studies generated findings about fatigue symptoms in HIV based on a novel combination of sensor and survey data, as well as some lab measures of inflammation, and I'm still working through all of the data. Everyone on the study team volunteered their time, and it cost less than $20,000 to complete. We all ended up kind of tired, of course, but because we cared about the topic we were able to do a lot with just a little. In another study, I was co-PI on a three-site randomized controlled trial with all the bells and whistles, which cost over three-quarters of a million dollars. That study produced null results because of a problem with selection bias. It was a very expensive mistake; all I can say is that it seemed like a good plan at the time. As with most areas of life money does make things easier in science, but it isn't the only determinant of success.

Finally, science is exciting, with the ultimate potential to expand the boundaries of our shared human experience. The greatest reason that I kept coming back to the science fair every year was to see the sparkle in the kids' eyes, and to hear the excitement in their voices when they talked about the projects they had done. Because of the fundamental conservatism of peer review, many highly-funded studies make only small and incremental contributions to knowledge. However, some studies do produce dramatic results. Last month humanity landed another rover on Mars, which is a triumph of engineering and already a source of fascinating pictures, with more complex discoveries yet to come. Last year in medicine, researchers found that artificial intelligence algorithms could detect cancer better than experienced human radiologists. Science also stays interesting because we don't always know in advance which studies will yield groundbreaking results. Basic science research, for instance, often has no immediate practical application, but can generate fundamental discoveries that turn out to be very useful later on. The record-setting success of COVID-19 vaccine development is a case in point: It wouldn't have happened if we hadn't supported efforts to better understand the SARS and MERS viruses even after they had been successfully contained. Human history would be very different if major scientific advances had not occurred, and those advances were by no means guaranteed -- they depended on individual scientists working on individual problems at specific times and places. This simple fact means that we undoubtedly have missed important things: There’s a lot left to discover and we never know what's around the next corner. Ultimately science helps us to confront the unknown. 

In celebration of my time with the science fair at Hackberry Hill Elementary School (Jefferson County Public Schools, Arvada, CO), here are three videos that I made with my kids. In them, we provide some advice for elementary schoolers and their parents on:

     (a) how to choose an interesting science fair topic - https://youtu.be/6oBEOnzXpNg

     (b)  how to conduct your study - https://youtu.be/-up_ecR-kDg and

     (c) how to present your results - https://youtu.be/d4ME1ti4djo

A side note to my scientific peers, or to those teachers whose curriculum suggests a more rigid order of steps in the scientific method: You will see here that I’m more of an inductive thinker than a deductive one. The formal hypothesis test features less prominently in my suggestions than the work of observation and discovery. This approach has always been successful for me in my own work. It’s an iterative process in which I look at some data, think a little, read a little, try something else, and think some more. You wouldn’t necessarily know that from my published works, where I tend to present results as though the study was pre-ordained from on high (as one does in scientific writing). In this way, I subscribe to Paul Meehl’s “think Yiddish, write British” school of scientific inquiry. Or in Kuhn's paradigm-shift language, I'm more interested in trying anything to resolve fundamental problems that can't be answered by our current state of knowledge, although I also see value in the "normal science" that slowly accumulates evidence and suggests new directions. There is of course no substitute for careful methodology. But there's also no substitute for creativity in scientific work: That's what makes science fun, and what generates progress in the centuries-long scientific quest for truth.