Many years ago, my 4th grade class took part in a school-wide science fair. There were awards for best projects per grade level, best projects overall, and various other categories.
The teachers acted as judges.
A boy named Seth had what I believed to be the best project in the school. It was a brilliant look at how weather affected the performance of different sizes and configurations of rockets he’d made in his garage.
He didn’t come close to winning. You see, Seth did the project all by himself. And it showed. His tri-fold display board had all the earmarks of a nine-year-old boy—uneven scissor cuts, finger smudges, and remnants of crusted glue.
The rockets, which he displayed in front of his 2D presentation, were unpainted and appeared crude and haphazard. (They were anything but.)
The winning projects were a complete inverse. Lacking depth or creativity—and in most cases pulled right off of the internet—their 2Ds were beautifully designed.
Bright, colorful, pin-neat, and with perfect grammatical sentences. Scientific method followed to a tee.
And clearly not done by elementary age children.
Presumably, the winning students did help with their projects. But amid all the attention they got that evening—the proud smiles, applause, photos, and balloons—it was hard not to be discouraged. The whole affair was farcical.
Meanwhile, none of my students received any recognition and I knew I couldn’t tell them why.
Refuse
Allowing anyone other than students to play an active role in project-based learning is a bad idea. It’s unfair. It’s dishonest. It’s discriminatory toward students who do the work themselves.
It also leaves them jaded and questioning why they should even try or whether everything in life is similarly rigged.
As for the students whose parents or teachers do most of the work for them, they do get the glory and the plaudits. But they lose out on what really matters, which is the learning and experience of working through challenges to create something interesting and uniquely theirs.
Furthermore, they know they didn’t actually do the work, which can destroy their self-worth and leave them afraid to try anything on their own.
The first step in fixing the problem is to refuse to play along. Make the practice of allowing adults to help forbidden in your classroom. Be willing to let your projects look like they were done by children.
Guidelines
What follows is a list of guidelines that can help you protect the integrity of project-based work.
1. Take time to teach the scientific method—or applicable method depending on the subject—in detail and allow your students many opportunities to practice and master the process through repetition before considering individual projects.
2. Require that your students create every aspect of their project independently. Yes, they may ask you clarifying questions and their parents’ opinion on areas of their project. But the work is on them.
3. Be willing to disallow, require a redo, or remove points for any part of a project that was clearly done by an adult or pulled right off the internet. If you observe the work closely, and look out for it, it’s easy to tell.
4. Limit the design materials that may be used to what you can provide to your students. This not only encourages independence and ensures fairness, but it places greater emphasis on the actual science or research of a project.
5. Be honest with grading. Follow to a tee a detailed rubric that you created yourself and shared with students ahead of time. Refuse to inflate any grade. Give in on this one thing and all hope is lost.
6. If applicable for your grade level, require your students to use several methods of final presentation—written, oral, online design, 2D and 3D models, and/or video. This packs in more learning and exposes non-student work.
Honor
For project-based learning to be an effective learning tool, you must protect its integrity. You must build an impenetrable wall of stone around your students so they can work and create independently.
Because they come first.
They come before their parents and your grade-level team. They come before the pretty award certificates and silky blue ribbons. They come before your reputation, the Instagram snaps, and a “way to go” from the principal.
You’re their teacher. That means something more than mere window dressing.
You best honor your students not with a meaningless, unearned certificate destined for a box in the family attic, but with skills and abilities that continue to impact them far into the future.
PS – I was on the Teacher Rockstar podcast this week. Here is the link if you’d like to listen.
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I agree with you. I always felt rather guilty about winning the science fair and being in the newspaper, because the project had been my mom’s idea and she did most of the polishing up to make sure it looked good… I appreciate my Mama so much, but I didn’t really feel like I deserved all that credit or recognition. 🙂 I don’t feel any iota of sense of pride or ownership in that “accomplishment” from middle school. Other things I did on my own, yes, I did the work. I have good feelings from those. When professors praised my writing, and told me to get things published, etc.
I love that you stress teaching the process before they start. I remember as a kid feeling completely baffled, not understanding what I was supposed to do. (I was one of the kids “on my own” with no parental help.) The science fair is one of my worst educational memories. But if it had been taught, explained — love this! 😃😂
Totally agree. I am not a fan of at-home projects for the exact reasons you listed. We all know that 99% of projects that are done at home are done by the parents. Adults think that children’s projects should look like adult projects. The truth is the opposite. If a young child completes the project with minimal (reasonable) help, it should NOT look polished and magazine ready.
I also think that school-wide competitive science fairs should be optional. In my opinion, there is a lot of work/time/money required for these types of competitions. It’s no different than a spelling bee or a quiz bowl competition. Students have to practice and study. The people who participate should have a true interest in the content. We would never force an uninterested student participate in Battle of the Books, yet we will force uninterested students to compete in a science fair.
Our PBL projects are done at school by the students. . .
In my school too. Project based learning is great. The problem is turning it into a contest.
If competing in the science fair means completing a project based leaning assignment based on the syllabus and meeting learning outcomes then we should definitely expect them to compete. We don’t tell students that its all right not to complete maths homework because they are not interested in maths. The same should apply for science.
I totally agree. One year my son’s Boy Scout Troop were given the assignment of making a cake for a fund raiser. The cakes were supposed to be made for a cooking badge. My son did his cake and named it “Snow What?” The cakes all arrived and half of them were bakery cakes and the other half were obviously done by the mothers. My son was very embarrassed because his cake was a white cake with powdered sugar sprinkled on top. But the tables were turned because his cake auctioned for more than most of the others. The other cakes didn’t even auction for the cost of what the cakes cost the parents. I am so glad that the buyer of my son’s cake saw that this was truly an eight year-olds effort.
Excellent article. We had our first school-wide fair for my content area last year and one of my students asked me, “Miss, why do their projects look better than ours?” — It was obvious that the projects they referred to had been done exactly as you noted. This was exactly the question I feared I would receive from my students. Thankfully there were no silly prizes given out. My student approached me at the end and proudly shared how many people she had presented to. In the end, I’m glad she focused on what mattered. But the fact that it even came up at all is shameful.
This is one of your best!
I teach third grade,in a title 1 school. I am supposed to send home a project sheet where the students build a Native American home using natural resources. I already felt like some students wouldn’t get the support they needed at home and some would get way more than needed. After reading this, I gave decided I will not send the assignment home, but will give the students the opportunity to complete it in the classroom. Thank you!
I had a similar experience as a child at an “invention convention.” I did all the work myself and as a result my project was — you know — kind of childish. I don’t necessarily think I should have gotten more recognition for what I did but I do remember walking around and realizing that other people had approached the project so differently and that clearly their parents had been very, very involved. At the time both my parents were working long hours and couldn’t have helped me in that way. I remember feeling kind of sad at the way it highlighted the differences between families and their resources …
This got me emotional because I can relate
This is also true of partner work. I created a group grade sheet, the students had to write down what they did that day, and the partner and I had to sign it. Then I put like kids together. Inquiry, group work, project based learning sounds so good, but unless handled very carefully complete understanding is often not achieved.
Yes, great message. I always try to tell parents, the project SHOULD look like a fifth grader did it. (I teach fifth grade )
I totally agree with you most projects are done by parents some go an extra mile to pay someone to do for their kids.
Thanks for the good advice I gave them 3-D shape to build dream catcher n I will advise them to bring materials to school so that they can make for themselves it encourage creativity thanks again
Kind of along the same lines is an ‘internet research’ requirement that I adopted from another teacher. To avoid copying verbatim from the internet, my students are not allowed to bring pencil or notepads to the computer lab when doing research. They must then return from the lab and write, in their own words, what they learned. No more lines of incomprehensible text produced by 3rd and 4th graders!
Just for a bit of contrast and humor are the times that I checked homework and was surprised at the number of mistakes made. Upon questioning, the students shrugged and said “My parents did it.”
So I told them I would send home two pages, one for them, and one for their parents.
Ha! That’s great.
I think it’s best to do school work in school to prevent Tutors or parents from doing the work. In high school I think it is important for essays to be written in class to prevent AI or tutors from writing them.
This is one of the reasons I have my science students do their projects (both independent and group) during class time. I can see who is really doing the work and who is letting someone else do it for them. I can also step in and settle problems before they blow up, unlike if the students were doing the work for homework. My first year, I would have students yelling at each other during presentations because no one was the mediator while they were working. Now, by the time they are presenting, most of the kinks are out. I can also judge which students need fine motor skill help (a problem in 7th grade) so that their final project is based on content and not physical abilities.
I agree completely! I am not a regular school teacher. I started following your blog when I started teaching children at my church. And I had 8 children of my own.
Anyway – I remember some of the science fairs my older children participated in – and how I helped them – because what was expected was far above what ANY child could do – and I remember resenting that I should have to be involved with their homework. Later, a teacher told me that it was fine to let my child’s work be unpolished. Finally, another teacher got it completely right when she decided to have her students do ALL of the science fair work at school – so parents weren’t involved at all.
I totally agree that the work should be the children’s work. Many years ago I was a 4H advisor. The fair had a competition to decorate the fair booth for each club. Our kids did all the decorating…and it looked like it. The booth that won had computer printed signs and everything was made by the parents. There weren’t even any kids at the fair doing the decorating in that booth! Needless to say, our booth did not even place and our kids were discouraged.
Several years ago, I remember overhearing one student ask another, “So what’s your mom gonna do for your project this year?” I had another mother come to the media center to “finish” her son’s project for him. I strongly encouraged her to let him complete it, but she said he couldn’t miss baseball practice “just to finish a project that didn’t matter.” I discreetly mentioned this to his teacher.
There was a time when I provided everything needed for projects and they were done in class. Today teachers would love to have time for students to work on projects during class, but they’re pushed so hard to get through content these days that there’s no time for that.