Reflections on Middle School Science Fair

calmom
Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:26:58 +0000

I wish I had videotaped it because the visual image of the judges and the winners in an auditorium filled with children of color was very striking.



I think this is a very insightful comment, because even if the judging was “fair” against whatever rubric was set, I’m sure every little nonwhite child noticed what was going on. If this is typical of their experience – its not hard to see why many young boys get discouraged with the educational system early on, and look for “success” outside of schoolwork and academics.

I do think your school could strive for more diversity, perhaps by recruiting adults from the community to volunteer to be the judges in such circumstances - or perhaps high school seniors enrolled in AP science classes. You live close enough to many colleges and universities, so it wouldn’t be all that difficult to find individuals who represent more diversity, including many with strong math and science credentials. I have a feeling that the results would be different with a more diverse panel – I agree with the sense that there is an subtle, implicit bias that the young white women doing the grading probably have – but even if not, there would be a greater appearance of fairness if the panel were more diverse. And if there were real-life scientists and professionals among the judges, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds – that would at least send the message to the kids that they can succeed in the sciences.

But a solution might also be found by changing the criteria or categories for judging. That is, rather than judging all the entries by the same uniform criteria, they could set up a set of different categories: “most original”, “best application of scientific method” – as well as “best presentation”. Or they could do some division of awards by field, for example, a different category for life sciences, chemistry, physics, engineering, etc. That might or might not cause a shift in results – but it would be interesting to see what happens.

I hope you can follow up with your concerns to the PTA or to whatever body organizes the science fair. The point really is not that the current system is unfair, but that it simply functions in a way that tends to be discouraging to young kids at a critical stage in their development. You don’t want boys getting the message in middle school that academics achievement is something mostly for white girls – so it makes sense to try to structure school activities in a way that will tend to encourage the kids most in need of extra encouragement. Of course, girls need to be encouraged in math & sciences as well – so your observation that girls won a lot of awards is not entirely bad; it’s just that the system needs more tweaking.