Science-minded citizenry gets smaller as science fair participation declines

Despite recent publicity from the Obama administration, participation among high school students in science fairs across the country appears to be declining. Obama hosted a science fair at the White House last fall and during his state of the union speech he said that America should celebrate its science fair winners like Sunday’s Super Bowl champions, Amy Harmon of The New York Times reports. Some educators say the cause for the decline may be the Education Department's own policy emphasizing "math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require," Harmon writes. (Photo: Megan Perkins, winner of Best in Fair at the Kentucky Science and Engineering Fair)

"To say that we need engineers and ‘this is our Sputnik moment’ is meaningless if we have no time to teach students how to do science," Dean Gilbert, the president of the Los Angeles County Science Fair, told Harmon. Science fairs in many schools rely on teachers for extra work outside of class time. While organizing the Northeastern Minnesota Regional Science Fair, Cynthia Welsh, a science teacher at Cloquet High School near Duluth, Minn., reports working over 500 unpaid hours since September. Many middle schools still require participation in science fairs, but high school participation is often limited to a school's best students, who are entered in elite science competitions that require years of work and lengthy research papers, Harmon writes.

"What has been lost, proponents of local science fairs say, is the potential to expose a much broader swath of American teenagers to the scientific process: to test an idea, evaluate evidence, ask a question about how the world works — and perhaps discover how difficult it can be to find an answer," Harmon writes. Michele Glidden, a director at Society for Science & the Public, a nonprofit group that administers 350 regional fairs, notes, "Science fairs develop skills that reach down to everybody’s lives, whether you want to be a scientist or not. The point is to breed science-minded citizens." (Read more)