Kennedy High School seniors excel in science

Six Kennedy High School seniors recently competed in the prestigious Long Island Science & Engineering Fair, hoping to win one of 20 slots in the International Science & Engineering Fair, which began last Sunday in Pittsburgh.

LISEF was held in two stages –– at the Crest Hollow Country Club in Woodbury in February, and at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale in March. All six Kennedy students, who were participants in the school’s three-year Authentic Science Research Program, were finalists in the competition. One of them, 18-year-old Brett Gossett of Bellmore, prevailed, winning a place at ISEF for a behavioral science project that he completed at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital last summer.

For his project, Gossett needed 24 large boxes to fit all 5,000 of the envelopes that he sent out last August. The envelopes contained three essays –– all of which Gossett wrote. The middle school English teachers whom he sent the essays to did not know that, however. They believed that they were written by three students with disabilities –– one with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, one with diabetes and one with cerebral palsy. The students, Gossett told the teachers, were taking part in an essay contest in which they were asked to describe their disabilities.

Gossett, who spent a week stuffing the envelopes, received 557 responses from the teachers, and he then spent weeks analyzing their grading, determining in the end that the “student” with cerebral palsy had almost always received higher grades than the other two “students,” despite the papers’ similarities in style and grammar. Gossett hypothesized that the teachers tended to grade the student with cerebral palsy higher because they felt a greater degree of sympathy toward students with visible disabilities.