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Re: Science Fair

Donald E. Simanek wrote:

On Tue, 21 Apr 1998, Raacc wrote:

I went to my daughter's 6th grade science fair tonight. The experiments
ranged from the battery that lasted the longest, to the paper towel that
absorbed the most. It was an introduction to the scientific method and I was
pleasantly surprised at the turn out.

Surprised at the turn out, but were you surprised at the quality of the
experiments and their interpretation/analysis?

Having judged science fairs in my mis-spent youth, I am rather unconvinced
that they are operated in a way which promotes "scientific method"
(whatever that is).

A fairly broad statement there Donald. I find lots of kids with tremendous
enthusiasm for science. If science fairs can help to promote that enthusiasm
while also helping the kids learn a bit that is appropriate for their age - I'm
all for them. By analogy, the level of science was deplorable in the science
fiction books I read in elementary school. However, those books had a huge impact
on shaping my vision of my future.

I have only judged one science fair. To be sure there was a lot that could be
objected to. Approximately every fifth bench had yet another lemon battery ....
The project I remember best was a grade one student's "Why I Shouldn't Eat Snow".
It took her mother's claim that even though snow is white, it really has dirt
inside - and put it to the test with her toy microscope. She discovered her
mother was right. For this particular fair, they brought in dozens of judges, and
each of us was given six projects in our own area of expertise. We examined them
closely, then had a ten minute talk with the student to see how much they really
know about their project and teach them what their experiment would have looked
like it a "real?" laboratory. What were considered the best projects got closer
scrutiny by all the judges. So the students get to try something out, and get to
talk over what they did with an expert. - I'm all for it, and I think there are
bound to be lots of good ways to administrate science fairs.

This goes back to the 50s when they were doing experiments on the "power
of prayer on plants." An interesting reported result was that negative
prayer (praying for the plant to die) was more effective than positive
prayer. I still have the book of this title, which was a hot seller at the
time. Of course the studies claimed proper controls, use of control
groups, etc. etc.

Which brings us to something else. When there are still refereed scientific
journals that publish a lot of crap, I would be hesitant to judge grade 6ers too
harshly. Perhaps I'm treading on some toes here, but even in Physics journals I
am still amazed by some of the things that get past the referees. In fact, I have
recently had extensive dealings with two well accomplished professors who held
large research grants, published hundreds of papers, been used as experts by the
media, supervised dozens of theses ... and yet on the project with which I was
dealing with them, they demonstrated no knowledge of the scientific method. I
won't go into detail, it would take too long and might end me up in court, but if
men like this can demonstrate so little understanding of such things as blinds, or
the insignificance of trying 10 analysis methods before finding one which gives
you 9 out of 10 correct "predictions" - surely that should impact what we think is
reasonable to expect of the average grade 6er. Even if it just looks like role
playing to you, if their role playing demonstrates that they have learned a bit
about what the scientific method looks like, then something positive has been
accomplished.

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| Doug Craigen |
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| http://www.cyberspc.mb.ca/~dcc/eureka/ |
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