01 May 2004

Mentoring Student Scientists: Four Case Studies

Forrest M. Mims III (http://www.forrestmims.org/)
Editor, The Citizen Scientist (http://www.sas.org/)

Abstract

The mentoring of students who do successful science projects can take several forms. Mentoring can be indirect, as when the curiosity of a student is aroused by a web site or science publication. Or mentoring can involve personal conversations and e-mails in which the mentor provides project suggestions and technical advice. The latter form of mentoring can be quite basic, as when the mentor merely suggests project ideas and answers occasional questions. Or the mentoring can be far more sophisticated, as when the mentor actively supervises the student and provides laboratory space at a university or government facility equipped with sophisticated and expensive instrumentation. This paper presents four case studies of the basic category of direct mentoring. For in my experience, students who receive basic mentoring and are largely left to their own resources gain more from the experience than those who are placed in a supervised lab. The case studies given here demonstrate that mentoring is not always a one-way exchange. For mentors may learn as much from the experience as students. This reciprocity can provide a rewarding experience for both the student and the mentor.

Introduction

A visit to any middle or high school science fair will quickly demonstrate the positive impact of mentoring on student scientists. The mentoring may be indirect, as when students were motivated to do their research by print or web publications. Or mentoring may be personal, in which an advisor assists the student in arriving at a project idea and provides advice as the student completes the project. The personal mentor may be a parent, teacher, family friend, university professor or an amateur or professional scientist.

Mentoring can be far more sophisticated, as when the mentor actively supervises the student and provides laboratory space at a university or government facility equipped with sophisticated and expensive instrumentation. Projects produced by students provided this level of mentoring are often the top winners in regional and national science competitions. In my personal experience mentoring numerous young people, both indirectly through articles and books and directly through personal meetings, students who receive basic mentoring and are largely left to their own resources gain more from the experience than those who are placed in a supervised lab.

Whether indirect or personal, mentoring at all levels can have a major impact on students and their science projects. Of special interest in this paper are basic mentoring experiences in which students went far beyond the initial advice about starting and executing a project and made original scientific discoveries.

At the beginning of the mentoring process, neither the student nor the mentor can anticipate how the project will evolve and what conclusions will be made. Yet despite this uncertainty, the mentoring of students is often a mutually beneficial process, for often the mentor learns at least as much as the student when a project is well executed.

Here I relate several specific examples that nicely illustrate the synergistic impact that can occur when students are mentored. The first examples concern students at Seguin High School in Seguin, Texas. I'll close by relating a mentoring relationship with my daughter, Sarah Mims, that resulted in a significant discovery and a scientific paper whose significance may exceed the overall merit of all of her mentor's papers.

Clint Beicker and Sahara Dust

The total amount of haze between the ground and the top of the atmosphere is measured by instruments called Sun photometers. Shawn Carlson described in "The Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American (May 1997, pp. 106-107) a simple, inexpensive Sun photometer that I developed for a National Science Foundation educational project. This Sun photometer was installed in a VHS video cassette box and was called the Visible Haze Sensor-1 or simply VHS-1. Hundreds of students and teachers across the country built this instrument, including Clint Beicker when he was a sophomore at Seguin High School in Seguin, Texas.

Teachers and parents often asked me to mentor students. In this case, Clint's parents were members of a Sunday School class I taught, and in the fall of 1998 they asked if I could advise Clint about building and using a VHS-1. I told Clint about the column in Scientific American and gave him a few ideas about what to measure. After he built the instrument, Clint asked a few basic questions about how to calibrate his instrument. I heard nothing more from him until learning he had won various science fair awards for using his VHS-1 to measure the haze caused by the plume from a large coal-burning power plant near San Antonio, one of several ideas I had suggested.

The following summer Clint asked how he could use the VHS-1 to measure something else. I suggested that he drive transects across San Antonio on clear and hazy days to see if he could measure and graph the dome of haze that sometimes occurs over that city. As in the first year, I heard nothing more from Clint until the science fair, where he received various awards for his high quality observations of the dome of air pollution that sometimes occurs over San Antonio. He also earned a trip to the Alamo Regional Science Fair, where he earned still more awards and a trip to the Texas State Science Fair.

During his senior year, Clint again asked if I could suggest a new idea for his Sun photometer project. This time I suggested that he attempt to measure the haze that occurs when huge clouds of dust from the Sahara Desert occasionally blanket the skies over Texas. I showed him how to find satellite measurements of the dust and suggested that he make photographs of the colorful twilights that it caused. As in the previous two years, I heard very little from Clint while he conducted his research. This project was by far his best. He made optical depth measurements of Sahara dust as good as those I make, and he won numerous science fair awards. He even earned a trip to the International Science and Engineering Fair.

Clint Beicker is now an engineering student at the University of Texas. While the mentoring received by Clint was both indirect and personal, he was a self-starter who required no direction once he began his projects. There was a synergistic response to my mentoring of Clint, for his success with the VHS-1 helped convince the GLOBE Program (www.globe.gov) to add a Sun photometer program to its environmental science protocols.

Jud Alexander and Bacteria Sunscreen

Several years ago, Seguin High School student Jud Alexander called to seek advice for a science project. He had read how I found significant changes in airborne bacteria populations in Brazil when severe smoke greatly reduced the ultraviolet (UV) levels there. He wanted to study this topic.

I explained what I had found in Brazil and mentioned how certain bacteria found on the upper surface of leaves seem to be protected from UV rays by carotene, an orange pigment that absorbs UV. I assumed Jud would expand on my findings in Brazil by studying the enhanced survivability of orange plant bacteria as opposed to clear and white bacteria floating in the air. But Jud thought of a different idea. He wondered if the orange bacteria on leaves might help protect plants from excessive UV by forming a protective shield. He found that there are more orange bacteria around noon, which is what I found in Brazil.

I was using plant bacteria as indicator organisms to better understand how the non-pigmented bacteria that can cause disease are suppressed or killed by UV. It never occurred to me that those orange bacteria might play an important role in protecting the leaves of plants. Earlier I had reviewed the thick book "Plants and UV-B" for the journal Bioscience. There was no mention of this phenomenon. Nor could I find any reference to it elsewhere.

Jud received only a third place at his school's science fair for his project, "Nature's Bacterial Sun Screen for Plants." Yet he may have made a new discovery about an unexpected role for pigmented plant bacteria. Jud's project is a classic example of how mentoring became a jumping off point for a student who went much farther than the mentor anticipated.

Lanster Martin and Satellite Validation

Since 1990, I have been actively involved in comparing measurements made by satellites with similar measurements made from the ground. I have long advocated that students can do such validations. But it's difficult for students in a traditional school setting to go outside at the odd times that satellites pass over. Last year this goal succeeded when Lanster Martin, a junior at Seguin High School, used the Radio Shack Sun & Sky Monitoring Station to validate measurements of aerosol optical depth (haze) made by the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite.

When I designed the Radio Shack Sun & Sky Monitoring Station, a principle goal was satellite validation. I included in the operator's manual all the information necessary to validate satellites that measure haze and total water vapor. Yet I did not know if an unsupervised student could handle all the work required to succeed. A major concern was how well students on their own could do the necessary calibration procedures.

I didn't tell Lans about these concerns when he began his project in the summer of 2003. Instead, I encouraged him to press ahead and gave him some tips about how best to make measurements when Terra was passing overhead. When he collected his first calibration data, I showed him how to enter the data into a program that provides the key calibration numbers to measure optical depth.

I didn't hear much from Lans during the summer. He was working for his father's air conditioning company and making satellite overpass measurements when he could find time. By the end of the summer he had accumulated 13 measurements under circumstances good enough to compare with the satellite. His results were stunning. His data so closely tracked the satellite data that his findings will be used in a future scientific paper on the subject.

Lans Martin has one more year of high school to complete. Already his project has earned him some science fair awards. He will probably add a good many more if his future results are as good as what he has already obtained. This is very much a mentoring in progress.

Sarah Mims and Fungal Spores in Smoke

All three of my children excelled at doing science projects in school. Therefore, some background is in order before describing Sarah Mims' rather amazing discovery of living fungal spores and bacteria in smoke arriving in Texas from Yucatan and Central America during the spring of 2002 and 2003.

During the summer before his senior year at Seguin High School, I suggested to my son, Eric Mims, that he build a novel kind of seismometer I had long thought about making myself. Eric decided to take on the project, and within a few weeks he had built a highly sensitive optical fiber seismometer. He bolted the base of his seismometer to the concrete slab under the carpet of his bedroom and was soon detecting earthquakes from distant locations. His most exciting results were detecting the p, s and l waves from two underground nuclear blasts in Nevada. This achievement earned him a record number of awards at the Alamo Regional Science and Engineering Fair and a trip to the International Science and Engineering Fair.

Vicki Mims, now Vicki Mercer, had measured the Sun's rotation when she was a middle school student at Lifegate Christian School by tracking the position of sunspots over a few months. I described this project in my first installment of "The Amateur Scientist" for Scientific American (June 1990, pp. 130-133). When she wanted to do another Sun project during the peak of the last solar cycle, I suggested that she try to detect solar x-ray flares using a Geiger counter, even though a scientist I know said this would not work. Vicki pressed on and eventually detected 12 X-class solar x-ray flares. Her findings are outlined in a chapter she wrote for a book (Joseph J. Carr, Radio Science Observing, Vol. 1, Delmar Learning, 1998) while she was still in high school.

Sarah Mims, a senior at New Braunfels Christian Academy, has continued the tradition Eric and Vicki established. In 2001, I suggested that she consider taking Clint Beicker's Sahara dust project the next logical step by trying to actually capture some of the African dust that falls to the ground. Sarah was immensely successful at this, and she eventually validated the presence of Sahara dust in Texas using a $30 microscope, a piece of polarizing plastic film and polarized sunglasses that she wore while using her microscope to inspect the many dust specimens she collected with various homemade air filters and collectors. This discovery earned Sarah many science fair awards, including First Grand Prize in Physical Science at the Texas Junior Academy of Science.

Sarah always said that she would like to do a biology project, so while we were driving home from the Texas State Science Fair in April 2002, I suggested that she consider trying to become the first person to find fungal spores in Asian dust that crosses the Pacific each spring. Sarah was very much aware that spores had been found in Sahara dust, so this idea appealed. A major Asian dust cloud was forecast to arrive over Texas in late April 2002, so she began setting out Petrifilms and microscope slides to capture dust. If fungal spores were present, perhaps some would grow into recognizable colonies on the Petrifilms.

Soon Sarah began finding large numbers of colony forming units (CFUs) on her Petrifilms, but the Asian dust had not quite arrived at our site. An e-mail to Dr. Tom Gill, an aerosol specialist at Texas tech University, revealed that only smoke from Central America was overhead.

Gill's e-mail led to serious discussions between Sarah and me about what might explain her findings. How could bacteria and fungal spores be embedded in the thick smoke that was over our site? Does not fire kill microbes?

I suggested an experiment for Sarah to conduct, which she quickly prepared. First, she placed dried grass in an old metal trash can, which she had placed in a corner of our field. She then attached bacteria and mold Petrifilms to a pole using binder clips. When all was ready, she ignited the grass and then removed the covers from the Petrifilms. She then held the Petrifilms in the smoke from the fire for one minute. She repeated this exercise with a fresh set of Petrifilms away from the smoke to provide a control sample.

Sarah set the Petrifilms aside to incubate. Three days later the Petrifilms exposed to smoke were covered with scores of bacteria and fungi CFUs, while the control samples had only a few. Sarah had made a huge discovery: Fungal spores and bacteria are transported in the smoke from biomass fires. Some of the spores and bacteria probably come from unburned material near the flames and others probably arrive with air rushing into feed the flames. In any event, it appears that the convection of a fire is sufficient to dislodge numerous spores and bacteria from soil and unburned plant matter. Those that are not pulled directly into the fire rise skyward with the warm plume of smoke.

Sarah validated her discovery by burning small amounts of various biomass on a steel plate. The smoke from every sample had many more spores than the adjacent air.

Meanwhile, Sarah continued to collect air samples using bare microscope slides placed on a small tower in our field every day for around two weeks. After the smoke season was over, she used her microscope to count the fungal spores and large carbon particles on each slide. The correlation coefficient of the spores and the carbon particles was impressively high (r² = 0.79), which provided strong support for the hypothesis that the spores had arrived with the smoke.

Sarah's science projects about her discovery earned her many awards, including two $10,000 college scholarships and First Grant Prize in Physical Science for the second year in a row at the Texas Junior Academy of Science.

None of our children ever studied the same topic for two successive years, but Sarah's discovery was different. She wanted to confirm that the spores had indeed arrived from Central America by taking samples from air at the Texas gulf coast before it passed over land. So in May and August 2003, my wife Minnie and I drove Sarah to Padre Island. There she collected air on a very smoky day in May and a very clean day in August. Her sampler on both occasions was a red plastic cup with a microscope slide slipped into slots cut in the bottom. She flew her 25 cent sampler from a kite to guarantee no contamination from possible spores near the beach. Sarah's kite samples confirmed her discovery, for the sample collected on the smoky day had many more spores and carbon particles than the one collected on the clean day. NOAA back trajectories showed that on both days the air had arrived directly from Yucatan.

Sarah's project earned her another round of science awards in 2004, including becoming a regional finalist in the Siemens Westinghouse Science Competition, third place at the National Science and Humanities Symposium, and presenting a poster paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual convention in Seattle. The project earned Second Grand Prize in Physical Science at the Texas Junior Academy of Science. Because this final project confirmed her discovery, I wondered why it didn't win first place again until I read one of the judging reports. While the judge was impressed by Sarah's work, she was not convinced that spores could survive fire.

Sarah had much better success with the peer reviewers of the journal Atmospheric Environment. I converted her Siemens Westinghouse paper into a formal scientific paper, added a few new paragraphs and references and we submitted it to the journal as a potential fast Track paper with Sarah as lead author. The editor was sufficiently impressed to send the paper out for priority peer review within only a day. The reviewers responded in 12 days, and we made the requested revisions over a weekend and resubmitted the paper. The editor accepted the paper only 21 days after we first sent it. It appeared as the first paper in the 3 February 2004 issue of the journal (Sarah A. Mims and Forrest M. Mims III, Fungal spores are transported long distances in smoke from biomass fires, Atmospheric Environment 38, 651-655, 2004).

Sarah's project has been described in articles in Australian, Canadian and U.S. science magazines. NASA's Earth Observatory web site has a detailed feature about Sarah and her project at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/SmokeSecret/smoke_secret.html.

Conclusion

As demonstrated by the examples in this paper, a basic function of mentoring is to help students find appropriate science projects to pursue. More importantly, the case studies related here show that students may take their projects far beyond the original idea suggested by a mentor. Even when working mostly on their own with little or no specific guidance from the mentor, students may even make novel findings and major discoveries. While they may not need to contact the mentor often, they always know that he or she is an e-mail or phone call away.

This, of course addresses only what the student gains from the experience. Based on my experience, which extends well beyond the examples given here, very often the mentor learns at least as much as the student. This could serve as a powerful incentive to attract more science and engineering mentors. It also brings us to another topic that mentors I know have often discussed. What happens to all those first rate student science projects? Should they not be made available for everyone to read and view on the web or in print? Could they form a vast database for the indirect mentoring of future generations of science fair students? That's a topic for another occasion, and I suspect that mentors will be in support.