Upward Bound Beetles Help to Keep High Schoolers on College Track
Contact: Randy Alford, 581-2964; Linda Ives, 581-2522; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — “I’ve got one alive and two dead. Do they normally lie on their back like that?” asks a high school girl in a University of Maine Upward Bound class. “How do I know they’re really dead?”
She peers into a screen box with a potato plant and begins counting beetles.
Forty-five high school students from throughout New England are divided into teams to test varying doses of two tropical plant extracts and an organic pesticide Spinosad (sold under the brand name Entrust R) on adult Colorado potato beetles. The experiment has never been done before, according to UMaine professor Randy Alford, an entomologist for 30 years and who oversees the experiments.
The class is part of the Upward Bound Math-Science Program, which introduces economically disadvantaged and often ethnically diverse high school students to college-level studies. Students work with UMaine professors, graduate students and even undergraduates who have passed through Upward Bound classes themselves.
They are now in the third week of the 2004 summer session, which ends July 29. Once accepted into the federally funded, three-to-four-year program, they spend six weeks each summer returning to Orono for Upward Bound classes.
Experiments typically take place in classrooms, labs and in the field. An offshoot of the Johnson Administration’s war on poverty from the 1960s, Upward Bound is designed to help highly motivated students overcome economic, social, academic and class barriers to higher education and break cycles of generational poverty. At UMaine, it is run through the College of Education and Human Development.
Part of why the program succeeds is that learning is driven by a framework that starts with hands-on science experiments and progresses to other disciplines — data entry, spreadsheets, math and statistics and report-writing — as students plan, execute and document experiments, according to Kevin Richards, a UMaine psychology major from Dover-Foxcroft who personally went through Upward Bound.
The experience makes college less intimidating and less mystifying later, he says.
Alford revels in the students’ excitement and sense of exploration, and says the research is scientifically important enough to be published in professional journals.
“This is what I want them to get,” says Alford as the students compare notes, chatter about the dead beetles in the laboratory and chart the results on a blackboard. “It’s their appreciation of the results and their relationships with each other