Motivating Students (and Parents) With an Academic Fair

Debbie Willingham
Mar 21, 2011

How can culminating and Extending Thinking projects motivate students to learn more about important topics?

Schools are always looking for ways to get parents more involved, whether with conferences, PTA meetings, to volunteer, or to just see the good things going on. Parents tend to come more often to events in which their own children are involved. For this reason, some schools and districts have expanded the idea of a science fair to all subject areas.

We've seen school-wide academic fairs planned in which every student has an entry in at least one subject area, usually of their choice. Entries may range from science projects, to digging deeper in a social studies or an English/Language Arts topic answering the age-old questions of how (does it work) and why (is it like this). Students create models applying mathematical formulas and solving real life problems, perform original dances, music, or skits, or prepare and carry out demonstrations. In other schools, each PTA meeting has a different subject area through the school year as the focus for displaying student work with each student participating more than once during the year.

The key to a successful academic fair lies in the quality of the work students do. It should not be a series of thrown-together models and posters that tend to just be “arts and crafts” work. Rather, they must continue the academic learning experience by taking students to a deeper level of understanding on any given topic; they must extend students’ thinking by encouraging them to use one or more Extending Thinking strategy (abstracting, analyzing perspectives, constructing support, using deductive or inductive reasoning, classifying, using error analysis, and comparing and contrasting). Student projects may take just one topic that has been studied and delve much deeper into it (Extending Thinking) or may pull together the bigger picture of a unit topic and answer the Unit Essential Question in a culminating project.

The reason these kinds of projects and academic fairs are successful in motivating students to want to do a great job is because they enable students to show off something not everyone else knows; they get to become the expert and explain something that is often difficult. Students are able to “tell the rest of the story” in their own way, whether that is hands on, creatively, or in a uniquely authentic way. They answer their own meaningful essential question using a modality and materials they choose, and a friendly competitive spirit often inspires them as much as the best teacher can. In the meantime, students are learning more about important things and expanding their ability to think at a higher level—a win-win situation!