Natural Born Scientists

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - “which is the mostest? which is the leastest?” They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart. ~ Buckminster Fuller

I’ve seen a number of articles over the last couple of months about youngsters doing scientific research. There’s the class of eight year olds who researched bees and published a peer-reviewed paper on them:

“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from,” the students wrote in the paper’s abstract. “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

There’s the ten year old girl who discovered a supernova:

Kathryn was rather blasé on Monday about her discovery. She was not quite sure what to think about it, her mother Susan said in an interview: “She did not understand why everyone thought it was such an amazing thing. For her, it was just something she works on with her dad.”

And now Anna and Henry Ayres-Brown, who helped their dad conduct an experiment on perceptions of statistical significance:

Anna and Henry entered the data into an Excel spreadsheet. They doublechecked the accuracy of their data, throwing out incomplete surveys and converting metric answers to feet and inches. They also analyzed the data, deriving the implicit standard deviation of each response and estimating the numbers included in all the tables. Additionally, they helped write the paper. In fact, Henry and Anna dictated part of this sidebar to their dad: “We were strongly motivated to work on this project by the prospect of getting our fi rst family dog upon the paper’s acceptance.”

I think kids doing science is objectively awesome, but I think it’s important to tease apart the different questions that a preteen publishing in a peer-reviewed journal provokes:

How does it benefit young people to do experimental science? How does it benefit to have their work acknowledged and praised by adults? Can young people contribute in a meaningful way to society’s collective knowledge?

These are all interesting questions, but I want to focus on the first one.

A few summers ago, I taught a psychology class to a group of gifted middle schoolers and high schoolers. In between the dream diaries and the sheep brain dissections, I encouraged them to design and conduct their own experiments, both alone and as a group. Our most memorable adventure was a trip out into the surrounding town where the students pretended to drop file folders and recorded demographic data - estimated age, gender, ethnicity - of the people who helped and didn’t help. Using some basic statistics, they determined that women were more likely to help, and that non-white student-experimenters were more likely to be helped. I asked them to write up the results in short papers, urging them to focus on their conclusions section and tell me, if we had more time, what further experiments they’d do. Their imaginations - and scientific instincts - did not disappoint.

To me, a science class without experimentation - original experimentation, not just walking through someone else’s methods - is like a literature course with no writing, an art history class with no painting or sculpting. A totally reasonable and valid choice, don’t get me wrong. But you don’t go into a literature course hoping to learn what it’s like to be a writer, and you can’t take a chemistry course where you learn the periodic table and avogadro’s number from a book and understand what it’s like to be a chemist.

Of course, most people get this - that’s why we have labs and hands-on learning experiences. But there’s a huge gulf between following a path that’s been designed for you and figuring out your own way through the forest. It’s the difference between transcribing a poem and writing your own.

And I think it’s important that every kid try to be a scientist, at least once, whether or not they end up in a research lab or on a stage or a trading floor or a basketball court.

I think it’s important for people to learn that knowledge doesn’t come easy, that the factoids and conventional wisdom they encounter are more likely than not empty air. That real understanding is precious, and that they need to make an effort - to think critically, to do research - in order to get it.

It’s important for people to learn that certainty is never absolute. You might think you know that the sun moves around the earth, that bumps on the head can tell you about someone’s personality, that global warming is fake or that universal health care is unnecessary or that your president is not really a citizen of your country - but you’ve always got to make room for a little doubt. Doesn’t mean you act on the doubt. But you make room for it.

It’s important for people to feel okay being wrong. There’s nothing like the sucker-punch of poor results, months of work distilled down to a single number that just isn’t what you want it to be. Or when you find something, when you’re high with the excitement of discovery, only to have it disappear when you try to replicate it. It’s a terrible feeling but it’s one you learn a lot from. You learn that being wrong doesn’t make you a bad person, or stupid. You learn that being wrong about one thing, one time, doesn’t preclude you from later being right.

And so while I think it’s great for these individual kids to have their names in the press and on peer-reviewed articles, and while I love the message that you don’t have to be a grad student or a professor at a university to do meaningful research, I think the biggest thing, for me, is that they tried at all. Hopefully teachers and parents will read about these young scientists and push their own kids to try their hand at forming hypotheses, collecting data, interpreting results. Not because every kid will succeed. But because most kids will benefit even - maybe even especially - if they fail.