High school science fair: School location trends in student participation and experience

The findings reported in this paper are based on surveys of U.S. high school students who registered and managed their science and engineering fair (SEF) projects through the online Scienteer website over the three years 2019/20, 2020/21, and 2021/22. Almost 2500 students completed surveys after finishing all their SEF competitions. We added a new question in 2019/20 to our on-going surveys asking the students whether their high school location was urban, suburban, or rural. We learned that overall, 74% of students participating in SEFs indicated that they were from suburban schools. Unexpectedly, very few SEF participants, less than 4%, indicated that they were from rural schools, even though national data show that more than 20% of high school students attend rural schools. Consistent with previous findings, Asian and Hispanic students indicated more successful SEF outcomes than Black and White students. However, whereas Asian students had the highest percentage of SEF participants from suburban vs. urban schools– 81% vs. 18%, Hispanic students had the most balanced representation of participants from suburban vs. urban schools– 55% vs. 39%. Differences in students’ SEF experiences based on gender and ethnicity showed the same patterns regardless of school location. In the few items where we observed statistically significant (probability < .05) differences based on school location, students from suburban schools were marginally favored by only a few percentage points compared to students from urban schools. In conclusion, based on our surveys results most students participating in SEFs come from suburban schools, but students participating in SEFs and coming from urban schools have equivalent SEF experiences, and very few students participating in SEFs come from rural schools.