The school science fair is set for Team Time on January 15. Invitations will be extended to students. I have only 8 invitations to extend, so the competition will be strong.
Although students will be presenting science projects during the 2nd nine weeks, the grades will be found in the assessment section of the 3rd nine weeks. This will provide a safety net for anyone who scores presents a less than satisfactory project. If that occurs, the student will have 3 weeks to prepare and present a new project. In order to avoid that problem I spent quite a bit of class time in the first nine weeks working with students on their plans and allowing them to submit and re-submit. I have spent time this grading period working with students on plans, forms, and data analysis. The only students that have not received this help are those that brought their paperwork to me on either December 13 or 14. Since each of these students was in my team time class where we spent time on writing hypotheses and determining if they should be accepted or rejected based on data along with other topics the students should have asked for help then. As I announced at Open House, I am available after school by appointment and I do duty in the auditorium with 8th grade students every Thursday from 7:25-7:45 and was available for consultation at that time. I even went to Sports study hall, Team Up and Community Ed and pulled students to give them help. HOWEVER, some students did not choose to take the opportunities offered. To avoid problems that a poorly executed project may incur, it is up to the sponsor/parent to make sure that the project you are signing for is
- an experiment,
- follows the rules,
- is safe,
- and provides for an adequate sample size. There must be multiple trials or multiple samples for the independent variable. One can't do an adequate data analysis with just 2 samples or even less than 5 for expensive procedures. A sample size of at least 10 is usually the minimum for a science project.
