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Find out if they accept team projects. If so, have the students work on them as part of your science instruction time rather than as an extracurricular.

This is great! I have never cared for the "traditional" science fairs where, as you said, it is quite obvious when a child gets a substantial amount of "help" from a parent. I taught a 2nd year advanced biology class at our high school for several years where we used this approach - students teaming, coming up with a research question, and then following through with a research project. They were able to take their projects to our regional ISEF affiliated science fair and compete. One group from the other teacher with one of these Biology II classes was able to go on to the International Science and Engineering Fair with their work. It was a lot of work, and I was each groups mentor. I did have the advantage of PD on the use of a variety of model organisms from our local university.

I too teach in a school district that has many students who are receiving free and reduced lunch. I currently work with many schools and teachers and have been a judge for many of their science fairs. Too often the boards are sloppy and the questions students start with are no really appropriate for a science fair. It seems like every year many students simply pick questions that they have seen on boards in years past. I like the idea of having students work in groups and giving the students cards with specific investigation topics. It would be nice for teachers to be able to incorporate science fair into their regular science instruction.

I have been spending my sabbatical on science fair and wonder if anyone knows why the NSTA position on science fair has remained virtually intact since 1968? While no one seems to be doing research on science fair (we are, and getting positive associations with increased state test scores for DISTRICTS who participate in science fairs) I wonder what the rationale is for the blanket statements discouraging mandatory participation or using using the science fair as part of a course grade? Do you use the rubrics that judges score as part of the course grade - or even if the score from the judges are not used, is some part of the project figured into their grade? If so, do you see what you do as a violation of the NSTA position statement? Let's pretend that the research that I have ongoing in 4 states continues to show that districts that do science fairs do better on state standardized tests (even accounting for free/reduced lunch, % minority, etc.) and classes that do mandatory science fair do better on standardized tests that those that do not (again adjusted for demographic factors). I can think of no other situation where an education body issues a blanket statement recommending against the use of a teaching method that is supported by research? Is their reasoning based off of the anecdotal evidence of Silverman and McBride (1988) or Craven and Hogan (2008) or Ann Cutler's JCST rant (2009)? Silverman and McBride start with a flower arranging contest and from this conclude science fairs are bad news. However, when cited by other authors, instead of being cited as a rant based off an unrelated anecdote, it suddenly becomes "data" from a "research" study. Then the circular citations start like some kind of anti-Obama scuttlebutt on right-wing radio. Or are they using the Blenis (2000) study on effects of a mandatory science fair? While that study did show that competitive science fairs had a negative impact on science interest for low achievers, non-competitive science fairs had a negative impact on high achievers. While it would be best to use methods that had no negative impact on any students, is promoting a method that turns off science achievers from science a good option? Furthermore, life is about learning our strengths a limitations. Yes, success is correlated with ability, but the misguided self-esteem movement assumed that if we gave everyone a trophy, they would have high interest and ability. How is that working out? Much has been written (perhaps starting with Bandura, 1997) about going down this road and how these people will become fragile and only seek out shallow, unchallenging experiences that reinforce their falsely inflated opinion of themselves. Failure is a great teacher, if supported properly. Well, I better stop, pot calling the kettle black about rants and all, but I would be interested in formally asking NSTA to reevaluate its position statement on science fairs (or at least clarifying some points - i.e. can the project be part of a class grade even if the judges score sheet at a fair is not? Can the completion of an independent research project, that so well aligns with our standards here in MN, be required even if extra-curricular participation in a regional science is not?)

One other thought on your project - at least here in Minnesota, there are a number of state science benchmarks that could be better met by assigning class topics than by allowing free reign of topics (although free choice of topics seems to be another pillar of the NSTA position statement). If 2 or more students (or groups) do the same topic, we have several benchmarks asking students to compare how differences in results often can be traced back to differences in methodology, or benchmarks requiring students to access and use available databases (such as pollution or ecosystem or seismic data available as an overlay in Google Earth) to make hypotheses and study relationships in a system, etc. By giving some restrictions on topics (and perhaps letting students pick from that subset) we can strengthen the relationship between science fair and the standards, rather that support the misconception that having students participate in science fairs takes valuable time away from studying for the high stakes tests.

We had school board members and high school science teachers judging our middle school fair in our district. The elementary schools choose their top 10 to send on to the regional fair, where several teachers from the local districts (myself included) as well as science students at the local university did the final judging.