Perspectives from a New York High School Science Research

Chapter 4

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Perspectives from a New York High School Science Research Enrichment Program Teacher Erin Wasserman* Formerly, Bedford Central School District, Science Department, Bedford, New York 10506, United States *E-mail: [email protected]

This chapter describes the research program at Fox Lane High School, a public school in Westchester County, New York. The average three-year class demographics at Fox Lane High School and in our research program is: 61% white, 27% Hispanic, 5.9% Asian, and 4.6% Black. The socioeconomic diversity of students who choose to participate in this research course ranges from English language learners to the affluent. A key feature of this program is the collaborative process for students to select academic, industrial, or other laboratory sites to conduct their original research project. Last year, our region of Westchester County, New York City, and Long Island hosted over 1500 high school science projects, team and individual, in regional science fairs. From these highly competitive fairs, over 50 projects were sent to prestigious international science fairs, where many placed well against their peers.

Introduction My research students at Fox Lane High School participate in prestigious regional, state, national, and international science research competitions and professional conferences. These include the Intel Science Talent Search, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, and the American Chemical Society’s Young Scientists Conference.

© 2016 American Chemical Society Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


Many students felt that this experience changed their lives in a number of positive ways, such as building independence, confidence, academic growth, and, above all, contributing to an original body of research that they can call their own. Belonging to a very competitive high school research region, it’s easy to believe that schools would only select the most academically gifted students to join their programs; however, at Fox Lane High School the program was open for any student with an interest in scientific research and a willingness to invest the effort to realize his or her goals. As the only Science Research teacher in the district, I was responsible for teaching, advising, and coaching 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students through their three-year programs, helping them to develop their interdisciplinary research interests, projects, and skills. The students featured in this chapter ranged in age from 15-18, and pursued research projects in different cutting-edge areas of science. This three-year program at Fox Lane is offered as a high-level elective and can be taken concurrently with other science courses. The average three-year class demographics are as follows: 27% Hispanic, 5.9% Asian, 4.6% Black, 1.8% Multiracial, and 61% White (1). Fox Lane High School encompasses a relatively diverse socioeconomic student body, from affluent students to first time English language learners, and provides an example of inclusion in its Science Research Program. The primary purpose of the program was to provide students with the opportunity to experience science through research-based projects in an area of their choice, affording them the time to develop research skills, as well as a unique exposure to the field before they decide whether to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). At Fox Lane, the Science Research Course was seen as an elite course – one that adds similar prestige to a student’s transcript as an Advanced Placement course. This was one key in attracting students to this course. They were also drawn by the presence of a knowledgeable class teacher that would help them navigate the unique challenges of student-directed, independent learning throughout their three years of science research in high school. At first, many students believe that the learning that they do in science research is something that they will be tested on; many tried to memorize simple facts and believed that this would suffice. Transitioning students to an understanding that learning is internal and that they are looking for connections between what they learn in their general science studies and their very specialized projects usually begins around January or February of their sophomore year (our school year begins in September) and continues throughout their three years in the program. It is often difficult for students to transition from classes where they are being told what to learn to a course where they must choose their own path of study, one in which they must manage their own learning to acquire the knowledge needed to answer the research questions before them.

60 Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


Designing a Science Research Program Formal Class Structure: Course Expectations, Requirements, and Schedule The classroom portion of my Science Research course focused on development of values, knowledge, and skills that students needed to use during their transition from a high school to a professional scientific environment. Students are required to complete a minimum of 250 or more research hours per school year - a minimum of ten hours of independent research in every two-week cycle during the school year, in addition to two formal class periods each week. Furthermore, students must commit to more than 100 hours of research during the summer months. Within these stipulated hours, students are expected to keep a professional laboratory notebook (with the mentor’s signature on laboratory hours), as well as maintain a project portfolio that includes project timelines. Finally, at the end of each school year, all students in the research program are expected to publicly describe their work. Each student delivers a poster or oral presentation at our school research symposium to parents, administrators, and community members (2).

Curriculum Science Research is a project/portfolio-based class. It focuses on meticulously monitoring students’ academic growth through justifiable numerical grades and copious feedback to the students and parents. My formal curriculum is divided into six main academic units as pictured below in Figure 1 (3). In each year of the program, students explore the same curriculum units; however, because their content knowledge has grown as they progress within the program, they can apply and develop the scientific literacy skills at new, more in-depth levels each new academic year.

Grading In a project-based class, it is important to meticulously manage and monitor student progress, since the project must be completed over a long period of time and there is no opportunity for students to cram at the end of a semester and achieve satisfactory work. Students are graded on their ongoing progress by meeting individually with the teacher biweekly, and by providing demonstrable evidence of their independent research, Figure 2 (4). For laboratory work, each student is provided a special laboratory-grade notebook to record their thinking, laboratory experiments and hours worked; these are reviewed by the teacher/mentor biweekly.



Figure 1. Science Research curriculum overview (3). (Reproduced with permission from reference (3). Copyright 2008 Gatsby Technical Education Project)



Figure 2. Example (adapted) of junior year student assessment sheet, tasks vary with each grading quarter (4).


Grading must be consistent for all students so it is crucial to establish a set of measurable criteria and routine for students to follow to, for example, unpack the complex information in journal articles – much of which they will never have been exposed to in a traditional science class, Figure 2 (4). This may be the first time that a 15-year-old student has seen a scientific journal article.


Research Mentor Selection Process Students begin the program by reading ‘popular articles’ and narrowing down a specific interest. Once they have focused on a specific topic, they begin a literature search in scientific journals to discover the types of research that are being undertaken in the field. After they have identified an area of research, they begin to search for local scientists who may be studying the same or similar topic, typically, in their geographical area. We have, however, had students travel to other countries and states to work with mentors on projects about which they are passionate. Before reaching out to any potential mentor, students must read journal articles that have been published by their potential mentor and learn how to draft a professional email. The student sends an email to the potential mentor, hoping for a response that will lead to a phone conversation and a possible apprenticeship in the mentor’s laboratory (8). Students sometimes will contact 10-15 potential mentors, each time going through the same preparation process. The process of teaching and guiding a 15-year-old to narrow a topic, learn to read journal articles, and find a mentor can take up to one academic year. Here it’s also essential to coach the students through times of rejection and help them stay motivated to persist with the process.

Student-Teacher Conferences: Clear Communication Each student is required to attend a biweekly, student-teacher conference to discuss their individual learning, communication with their mentor, and project timelines. These conferences present an opportunity for students to receive instruction on how to further apply the general skills or a more specific skill to their project as well as hold them accountable for moving forward on the project. In short, these meetings are a delicately balanced series of learning vignettes that represent the dichotomous relationship of the formal and informal pieces of the course. There are overarching educational themes that are presented at each meeting. Specific student needs and skill development themes and ideas intricately weave in and out of sessions throughout the course of an academic year. The teacher must appropriately accommodate those needs, oscillating between teacher, advisor, and coach, depending on the nature of the specific need during the meeting. The different nature of scientific disciplines, how students collect data, approval processes (IRB), and sometimes the ‘lucky’ projects that find results right away, means that research projects in different disciplines develop at different rates. This can sometimes be an emotional experience for high school 64 Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


students, who are commonly affected by peer pressure. It also means that, because some students will spend more time in a particular phase of research, they will have the opportunity to develop a skill in greater depth. The biweekly, student-teacher meetings allow time for student and teacher to work together to determine, among other things, the next steps for the research project. Teenage students are often afraid to take the first step. Some professionals may see this as procrastination, but it can actually represent fear. Students can ask well-reasoned research questions, but they still fear that their question is not good enough. They will conduct fact-checking research, but they still fear that what they have done is not thorough enough. It is well for the teacher to be reminded of the words of Carol Dweck (5), “I believe that meaningful work can also teach students to love challenges, to enjoy effort, to be resilient, and to value their own improvement.” As a teacher or research mentor, it is easy to simply review a student’s work by saying “try again.” However, we have the ability to help the student grow if we meet the student where he or she is. For example, because my course attracted students of all academic backgrounds, some students had fantastic reading skills, and some needed to improve their reading comprehension. The students need a teacher to meet them where they are, encourage them and be sensitive to their growth as learners. Every student has strengths, and the best teachers can find those strengths and help the students build their projects from their strongest skill. Doing that tends to boost the students’ confidence to show them that they can work on other skills, where they are not as confident or strong, while steadily forging ahead on the project.

Student Reactions, Contributions and Successes Quantifying evidence of early impact is difficult in the high school setting due to the need for a long-term longitudinal study involving minors (6). While I am interested in investigating such a project and have thought much about how to design a study of this caliber, I realize that it will take a large team to execute such a study. This experience exposes students to a genuine, long-term project, which they cannot experience in any other high school course. Throughout this journey, students experience undeniable growth in writing, problem-solving, data gathering, fact-checking, background-researching, and in learning to communicate complex scientific ideas to various audiences. Some responses from students who participated in the program are given below. “My research experience with Dr. Gilbert has guided my high school experience by teaching organizational skills that have allowed me to be successful in all educational aspects. It’s a wonderful and very rare learning experience that as a high school student, I am allowed to work with a college professor doing an experiment that I want to do.” - Alexa Shkrelja 65 Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


“I learned that science in a laboratory setting is kind of what you think - the white lab coats and strange machines. It was fun going from my childhood nostalgia to actually doing it in high school. I was surprised at how capable I was compared to the college intern, especially by my second summer. It turns out that picking up the background knowledge for the project was not too far from my own learning ability.” - Chris Milianta “It’s very different from any other classroom. There’s no lecture, [but] massive amounts of independent work, lots of deadlines, and if your time management skills are poor then the large workload will creep up on you. Science Research meshes the boundary between the high school and undergraduate classroom experience. This was one of the most unique classrooms that prepared me for my undergraduate program. Classroom support was crucial, continuing and pushing through, and not getting stuck. Journal article discussions were always increasing your knowledge – I love learning new things, it increases my ability to express ideas in front of a group, to me it was crucial practice for my future.” - Kurt Wasserman “I have learned how to be in a professional environment - a high level working environment; how to delegate; give and receive instructions; how to problem solve in a real way - consider cost, time, and importance of problem; how to work hard; refine papers; and construct presentations. I have spent many long days in the lab, there’s no winging it. It’s really the details that matter, not just for breakthroughs, but to be a skeptic with your own work and what others publish. I took the time to really look at variables, data, biased publications. Communication was also really big, specifically when presenting. You had to consider how to hook peoples’ interest – goal and application how innovative and creative the idea was as well as impact. I had to make people interested in what I’m interested in so that they’d gain a better understanding of the research.” - Charlotte Herber In this academic program, students have the opportunity to work with professional science mentors in a setting that provides a supervised environment in which the student conducts original research using state-of-the-art equipment found in top research laboratories. Some research students have been published and hold patents to their work. In the laboratory, students are asking the questions and defining the problems that they hope to work on, driving their motivation. By using models and conducting investigations, students have the opportunity to analyze and make sense of original data, and with the help of mentors, students explain these findings to a wide-array of audiences to which they may even use their evidence to argue solutions. Finally, below are a few examples (7) of student project abstracts, and recognitions garnered by students, which demonstrate the caliber at 66 Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.

which high school students were able to perform as a result of their development through this program.


Tic-Tac-Know: Autonomous Game Learning with Embodied Intelligence (4) Jacob Fetter Mr. Sam S. Adams, IBM Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to change the world. From manufacturing to video games, AI has influenced almost every part of modern life. The field of Artificial Intelligence is divided into two distinct segments, broad AI and narrow AI. Narrow AI is an AI that can complete one task very well but only that one task. Broad AI deals with developing AI that has the general ability to learn and adapt to situations. Implementing games is a classic approach to AI research. [1] Games make an ideal testing environment because they have clear objectives, end-points, and defined strategies. This paper details an experiment in creating a general game playing AI. The approach taken was to create an embodied system with sensors and effectors that it would use to interact with the environment. A system was tested on the board game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The system used a general learning algorithm and was successful in learning to play Tic-Tac-Toe at an amateur level. In the future this system will be tested on more complicated games like Connect Four™ and Battleship™. The long-term goal for this system is to have it be able to learn and adapt to new games entirely on its own or with minimal programming. Awards: WESEF Intel Excellence in Computer Science, WESEF Yale Science and Engineering Association Inc., JSHS Competitive Poster Antigen Transfer Between B Lymphocytes and Macrophages in Autoimmune Responses (4) Matthew Bruck Dr. Mark Mamula Department of Medicine (Rheumatology), Yale University The National Institutes of Health estimate that autoimmune diseases affect 5 to 8 percent of Americans, 11.4 million in total. So far, eighty to one-hundred autoimmune diseases have been identified by researchers. The related pathologies of autoimmune diseases allow insights gained into a specific illness to increase understanding of the group as a whole. Recently, B lymphocytes have been shown to behave as antigen presenting cells. Research has also revealed the importance of Scavenger Receptor A (SRA) in antigen transfer to macrophages. It is thought that interactions between B lymphocytes and SRA may lead to the onset of autoimmune diseases. Small molecules were used to block the surface proteins necessary for antigen transfer. Using anti-human IGg with fluorescent markers, these small molecules successfully interfered with antigen transfer from BJAB to THP-1 cells in non-lethal doses. Specifically, tannic acid, hematin, atranorin, and bithionol were discovered as the best candidates for future research. Each displayed a good 67 Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


correlation between dose and inhibition, each inhibited 85% of antigen transfer, and each caused less than a 50% increase in cell apoptosis. Awards: JSHS – 5th Place Speaker in Biology, WESEF – 1st Place in Biology Category - ISEF Finalist, ISEF 2nd Place Biology Uncovering the Role of Importin: Implications toward Circadian Rhythms (4) Kurt Wasserman Dr. Lino Saez, Dr. Michael Young Laboratory of Genetics, Rockefeller University In Drosophila, negative feedback loops control circadian rhythms. A key step in these negative feedback loops is PER/TIM nuclear translocation. Although IMPORTINS are known to aid in nuclear transport, their specific role and association with other clock proteins is unclear. To study that interaction, Actin-importin and Actin-importin α3 myc-tagged samples were generated. These tagged genes were transfected into Schneider line 2 (S2) cells with Act-PER-V5 and Act-TIM-MCH. Importin was immunoprecipitated to analyze associated clock proteins. Results indicate that importin α1 and importin α3 share a similar affinity for isolated molecules of PER and TIM; however, importin α1 shows a strong interaction with the PER/TIM complex. To study this interaction in vivo, IMPORTIN α1 protein was purified for antibody production. Awards: Westchester Academy of Medicine Award, WESEF 4th place in Biomedical Category, WR-JSHS High Honors – qualify for state speaker competition, JSHS – State Oral Research Presentation High Honors Discovering How Urbanization Affects Genetic Diversity (4) Denisse Gayosso-Lucano Dr. Amy Litt and Dr. James Lewis, New York Botanical Garden In the last century what used to be a continuous forest in northeastern United States is now an urbanized center like New York City, where population growth has dramatically increased. People focus on their daily routine, becoming desensitized to their surroundings. Increased amounts of CO2, heat, light and pollution as a result of urbanization have changed our environment. In this study, we examine the correlation between urbanization and red oak genetic diversity. Our methods include collecting leaf samples from 10 sites each containing 50 trees, extracting DNA, conducting PCR and electrophoresis to compare microsatellite fragments from each population. Comparing microsatellites enables us to determine whether genetic diversity has a positive or negative correlation with urbanization.

Conclusion A Science Research program, when meaningfully constructed and when the students are mentored and monitored in the right way, can become a valuable part of a school’s curriculum and a turning point in the lives of the students. 68 Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


Acknowledgments Thank you to my students for showing me that inspiration is a two-way street. Thank you to Fox Lane High School for the opportunity to teach this life-changing course. I would also like to thank my dear friend Damian Allis, PhD for his insightful thoughts, questions, and editing. Thank you to Sally Mitchell, 2016 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow for her suggestions and mentoring and Rabbi Avi Katz Orlow, Director of Jewish Education at the Foundation for Jewish Camp for asking questions of the text and experiential perspectives. Finally, thank you to my loving husband for his endless time and support in making this chapter a reality.

References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Bedford Central School District. http://www.bcsdny.org/files/filesystem/ BBTN%20FINAL.pdf (accessed April 7, 2016). University at Albany, Science Research in the High School Program. Copyright 2008 Gatsby Technical Education. Janet Longo-Abinanti (adapted), 2010 Westchester Science Research Teacher Conference, Yorktown, NY, 2010. Dweck, C. Even Geniuses Work Hard. Giving Students Meaningful Work 2010, 92 (1), 16–20. Sadler, T. D.; Burgin, S.; McKinney, L.; Ponjuan, L. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 2010, 47 (3), 235–256. 2012 Fox Lane High School Symposium Day Program, Fox Lane High School, Bedford, NY, 2012. Syracuse University, Syracuse University Project Advance Science Research.


Perspectives from a New York High School Science Research

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