Practical Strategies to Promote High Quality Authentic Student Research in High School Settings

Practical Strategies to Promote High Quality Authentic Student Research in High School Settings

Frank LaBanca
Center for 21st Century Skills at EDUCATION CONNECTION, Litchfield, CT and Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT, E-mail:
labanca@educationconnection.org.

Review of: Success with Science: The Winner’s Guide to High School Research; Shiv Gaglani with Maria Elena De Obaldia, Scott Duke Kominers, Dayan Li, and Carol Y. Suh; (2011). Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement, Tucson, AZ. 180 pages.

Having found personal success in the high school research arena, Gaglani and contributors De Obaldia, Kominers, Li, and Suh present a compelling guide to engaging in this process. The authors are all science major students or recent graduates from prestigious Ivy League research institutions who continued a research-based career pathway after high school. They provide keen student-perspective insights on the many facets of independent research.

Each chapter begins with a quote from a preeminent scientist and includes testimonials and advice from more than 50 notable and highly successful former high school science research students. The chapters end with “Take- Home Points” — bullet lists of the critical concepts found within each chapter. The book is divided into five parts: the benefits of doing research, getting started on a project, elements of a successful research project, opportunities and competitions, and research beyond high school. The authors document and support their ideas well.

This guide is not a manual describing how to conduct experiments; rather, it explores the social processes for navigating the research community of practice. The authors postulate that high-quality research will provide opportunities for scholarships, college admissions, and career decisions but, more importantly, they discuss the personal development and benefits that a student can gain. Perhaps the strongest portion of the guide is “Part II: Getting Started on a Project”. One of the greatest challenges for student research is developing a meaningful project that can be reasonably and successfully completed with the resources, time, and expertise available. The authors provide a multitude of suggestions for identifying significant and eloquent research questions, and for developing strategies to find a lab and mentor.

The guide also provides strategies for successful presentations (i.e., posters, orals, publishable papers), from the nuts and bolts of constructing high-quality posters and slides to the art of speaking to a variety of audiences. It provides a list of the major competitions available to high school students and methods for entering them. By providing event-specific strategies, the book helps a student ascertain the best methods to leverage odds for success.

The guide exclusively discusses research in terms of working in a laboratory on experimental projects and does not include other potential research perspectives (i.e., goal-based engineering projects, field work, observational studies, computer science software development/modeling). Unfortunately, Chapter 11 is dedicated to the so called (my emphasis) “Scientific Method”, espousing that there is a single, linear, step-by-step, hypothesis-based, problem-solving strategy for research. The authors do not provide insight to the reality of the idiosyncratic nature of science and the actual asynchronous routes that scientists traverse during the course of research. The authors would have done better service to the reader to stress that meaningful questions drive research, not some predetermined, prescriptional method of approaching scientific inquiry. Ironically, this concept is supported by some of the supporting testimonials.

Nonetheless, Success with Science is an excellent resource for the budding high school scientist, providing a wealth of suggestions and advice. The book would also serve the high school science teacher wishing to provide students with research opportunities. The guide might also be useful to mentors to gain perspectives on the dynamic nature of research with a high school student, and perhaps even undergraduate and graduate students.

Personally, I have mentored and coached over 200 high school science research students, with 15 earning national recognition for their work, including the Intel Science Talent Search, the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, and the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. From these experiences, I recognize that there is no simple formula for achieving research success with students. Rather, it is an open-minded willingness to help students find a tangible, significantly relevant applied project that has meaning both for the student and an authentic audience of practicing scientists and engineers. Fostering student creativity is paramount to the process. In other words, what happens before experimentation is often far more important than the experiments themselves. In addition, having students who are bright, eager to learn, resourceful and persistent, and who manifest an intellectual curiosity that drives and sustains their efforts to know and understand, can make the research process mutually successful and exciting. The fledgling scientist-authors of Success with Science certainly were these types of students. The real challenge for educators is to move more students towards this high level of sustained performance. This guide certainly provides some of the many tools necessary to achieve that goal.

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DOI: 10.1128/jmbe.v12i1.297
Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, May 2011
Copyright © 2010 American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved



JMBE
ISSN: 1935-7885