Do you feel like he was penalized for the work appearing to be above grade level? We had that feel ourselves when dd11 was in 5th grade. There were a couple of very impressive projects and, knowing some of the kids who did them, I suspect that many of these kids were capable of doing the work themselves. However, the projects that won generally showed much more rudimentary understanding of math and science albeit work that was clearly at the capability level of a 5th grader. I wondered if the judges (other parents) felt like the very high level projects were not done by the children entirely.
I don't see anything wrong with a child asking for help on a science fair project in the form of something like, 'I don't know how I show that this group did better statistically, can you teach me how to do the math to show that?' I would see a problem with a kid saying, 'I don't know how to show that this group did better, can you calculate that for me and write up the proof.'
I did admittedly spend time with dd teaching her about correlation coefficients and what constituted statistical significance, but she did the work and put together her results herself. A project with a similar need for an understanding of correlation that won in her category simply stated that, b/c there were outliers in the data set (not the term the kiddo used), there was no way to tell if ___ related to ___, which is of course not true at all. Dd had outliers, too, but she still had statistical significance.
I do like that your school at least had the judges talk to the kids so they had some idea as to whether above level work appeared to be of the child's own doing or whether his/her parents did if for him. I hope that he did well and felt good about the experience.
