There are plenty of problems with school science fairs these days, but one that increasingly stands out is that they heavily favor well-off families and schools. Between 2000 and 2015, a mere 10 schools from across the country claimed most of the prizes at the Intel competition (Schank, 2015). These schools tended to have access to working scientists and labs, and one offered special elective science fair courses and access to mentors.
But even more than the schools, it’s the families who matter. They put in time, money, and — if they have it — expertise. Some even hire science fair coaches and get in on everything from designing the experiment to testing the results (Yuhas, 2018). One science fair mother captured the craziness so well that she found herself with a viral hit on her hands after posting a parody science fair project called “How much turmoil does the science project cause families?” (Messina, 2014). It’s no wonder that one observer concluded, “These K–12 events are hardly more than a competition among over-involved parents” (Schank, 2015). But a competition to what end? An enhanced college application for their child, better odds at a future scholarship, a leg-up for a coveted internship, and so on.
To deal with this problem, some schools are dropping the traditional competition and are instead simply grading all projects submitted on the basis of students’ mastery of the scientific method rather than the final outcomes. But is competition itself the problem? History shows that competition can a powerful motivator in science and technology.
Perhaps the answer is to simplify our aims. Science fairs typically ask students to do something well beyond their abilities. What are the odds that an elementary school student is going to discover something new or develop a new technology? It can happen, but it’s not at all a criterion for good science, especially at the early stages.
So here’s a better idea: Give the kids a list of three items — say, a tennis ball, a coffee filter, and a test tube of vinegar. Or maybe a longer list from which each kid can choose three. Of course, the list would change from year to year. The task: Carry out a scientific study with these ingredients. Then let the kids run wild, fueled by their thinking.
This approach would encourage students to think up something for themselves, rather than accessing the avalanche of “science projects you can do” available online. It would also highlight individual innovation, since students are likely to come up with wildly different ideas. For example, by dropping a bit of water and drawing with different types of pens on the coffee filters, students can actually observe how different pigments separate and travel at different speeds. As they develop hypotheses from what they observe, they are walking in the early steps of Mikhail Tsvet, the Russian botanist who experimented on the pigments that make up plant dyes and went on to invent chromatography. With a simple tennis ball, creative students can bounce their way to a range of experiments and lessons on basic principles of kinetics or how temperature affects matter.
It may seem paradoxical, but there is a lot of evidence that constraints actually boost creative thinking. In a classic study, rodents who were forced to press a bar with only their right paws learned more ways to press the bar than a group of rodents that had free use of their limbs (Stokes, 1995). And researchers at the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins University have found that resource scarcity — not abundance — is associated with greater creativity and novel insights (Mehta & Zhu, 2016).
But perhaps most important, the “three ingredients” approach would reduce the degree to which money makes a difference. The ingredients themselves would be cheap — perhaps already commonly found in the home. Of course, there will always be ways for overzealous and overcompetitive parents to weigh in, but with this approach, kids from less privileged families and schools might not start out quite so far behind.
References
Mehta, R. & Zhu, M. (2016). Creating when you have less: The impact of resource scarcity on product use creativity. Journal of Consumer Research, 42 (5), 767–782.
Messina, S. (2014, April 3). That fake science fair poster that went viral? I made it. Here’s why. Huffpost.
Schank, H. (2015, March 12). Science fairs aren’t so fair. The Atlantic.
Stokes, P.D. (1995). Learned variability. Animal Learning and Behavior, 23, 164-176.
Yuhas, D. (2018, March 28). Are science fairs unfair? The Hechinger Report.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Todd L. Pittinsky
Todd L. Pittinsky is a professor at Stony Brook University and a senior distinguished fellow of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center on Long Island in New York. He is the author, with Barbara Kellerman, of Leaders Who Lust.
