Mentorship

Adult Assistance with Science Fair Projects

Mentorship Guidelines

• The science fair project is the student’s work. The mentor’s role is to provide advice and guidance, not to take charge of the project.
• A mentor’s time is valuable. The student should be punctual and prepared to make valuable use of his or her time with the mentor.
• If a student is working in the mentor’s lab, then he or she must be given the safety rules and necessary safety training.
• For the protection of the mentor and the student, all meetings should be held in the presence of others during business hours, at the student’s school in the presence of a teacher or staff member, or at another location with a parent or guardian present.
• Students must take the initiative to contact the mentor and make all arrangements, such as transportation, meeting times, provision of supplies, etc.
• The student is responsible for doing all of his or her own work except where safety or regulations prohibit this.
• All projects are required to declare whether the project involved a mentor and if yes, answer a few questions about the role of the mentor and his/her role in the project.

Responsibilities of Mentors

Mentors may be academic or professional scientists or engineers, graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, teachers, parents or, sometimes, other students. When a mentor works with a student in any setting, he or she should always keep in mind that the project is the student’s, both in its selection and its undertaking, and not the mentor’s. The mentor’s job is multifold:

• to assist/guide students in identifying project topics that address meaningful scientific questions while avoiding those that “re-invent the wheel” or the testing of whose hypotheses would add nothing to scientific knowledge;
• when there is mutual agreement that student will carry out the project in an institutional setting with access to specialized equipment and highly qualified personnel, to provide the student with a suite of project themes or topics that would make wise use of the available resources and would not require resources that are unavailable to the supervisor;
• to assist students in the gathering of salient background information;
• to teach students the techniques and skills they will need to test their project’s purpose or hypothesis;
• to critique constructively the publication of the work (clarity and logic of the Project Report, display, and oral summary);
• to ensure the safety of all concerned throughout the project;
• to provide upon request and in a timely fashion: documentation describing their mentoring/supervisory role; a brief description of the project including how it was selected and how it fits into the research projects/topics under investigation as part of his/her ongoing research program; and any constraints that preclude the student from carrying out certain components of the lab work associated with the project (e.g., student is a minor, use of lab equipment or instrument requiring high-level of training or certification for operation, safety or insurance restrictions);
• to provide solid mentoring models for their students by upholding the ethical values and academic integrity that underpin mentoring, the scientific enterprise, and scientific competitions such as science fairs.

Responsibilities of Students

It is the student’s role, and not the mentor’s, to conceive the project’s specific topic. All data taking must be the student’s own, unless the student does not represent it as his or her own and credits the actual data taker properly. Similarly, analysis of the data, the write-up of the project, and any public presentation of thereof are also exclusively the student’s responsibility. A student undertaking a mentored project has the responsibility to disclose that her/his project was mentored and by whom. An accurate description of the level and nature of the mentorship, role of the mentor, the setting(s) in which work was done, and how the project topic was conceived is expected to be included in the Project Report.

Responsibilities of Judges

Some in the science fair community feel that mentorship confers an unfair advantage on science fair projects. Judges must be sensitive to these concerns and ensure that judging focuses on students’ scientific thought, understanding and creativity. Some projects involving the use of sophisticated or expensive equipment and exotic materials are scientifically simple and less creative than projects using more common materials. Some judges can be unduly impressed by sophisticated equipment or materials, while others may be unduly impressed by the project carried out by a lone student in his/her garage using only household or commonly available materials. In all cases it is essential to look beyond the setting in which a project was carried out and to evaluate what science the student has actually done. Many, perhaps a majority, of science fair judges are involved in professional science and thus have an understanding of the nature of mentoring in the scientific enterprise and have some degree of experience in evaluating the scientific merit of work in this context. Judges with this background and experience have a responsibility to enlighten and assist judges who have no such context or experience. It is most often the case that a team of judges will be evaluating a group of projects, each of which has a different level of mentoring and one or more of which may be non-mentored. In this context judges have the following responsibilities:

• to avoid with diligence any biases for or against mentored versus non-mentored projects;
• to identify carefully, via documents provided by the student(s) and face-to-face discussion, the level and nature of any mentorship;
• to assess the degree and accuracy to which the student(s) disclosed and described any mentoring;
• to assess thoroughly the degree of independence in: topic selection; design of the study, experiment, or innovation; project undertaking; analysis of data; and project write-up;
• to assess the level of scientific understanding of the project and its scientific context displayed by the student(s);
• to assess and rank a project on the creativity of its concept; on scientific merit of its design and results, on the level of scientific understanding displayed by its author(s), the clarity of communications and dissemination; and, in the case of mentored projects, on the degree of independence from the mentor(s), all in relation to the age/grade-level of the student(s).

Data from the CWSF 2010

During Registration at the CWSF 2010, each finalist was asked to rank the level of mentoring received on a scale of 0 to 5:

1. I did not receive any mentoring.
2. I exchanged a few emails or phone calls, and/or met with my mentor once or twice to discuss my ideas.
3. I had occasional contact with my mentor by email or phone, and/or met occasionally with my mentor who provided some advice or materials.
4. I had regular contact with my mentor by email or phone, and/or met regularly with my mentor who provided advice, materials, assistance with design/testing, or data analysis.
5. I had regular face-to-face contact with my mentor and regular access to advice, materials, space, equipment, design/testing, or other personnel in a specialized facility.
6. I worked closely with my mentor over an extended period of time to develop the project idea, plan and conduct the research/development, and analyze the results or test the innovation.

The histogram below shows the level of mentoring received by each of the award groups.

One of the concerns often expressed regarding mentoring is that a highly mentored project has a better chance of winning an award than a project that is not mentored. The data below demonstrates that this was not the case at the CWSF 2010. In each of the award groups, one third or more of the winners indicated that they received no mentoring. With the exception of the Platinum Awards which comprise only three projects, each award group had all six mentoring levels represented.