Two Columbia Falls High School students took home awards at the state science fair. Colin Norick and Annabel Conger were the only high school students from the Flathead Valley to place at the state level.

Norick took fourth place and received the Psychological Science Research Award from the American Psychological Association for his project on “The Correlation of Lexile Level and Reading Comprehension while Multitasking.”

He expanded on his similar research from last year, which showed that students reading comprehension dropped when they were texting.

This year he started with the premise that high school students are unlikely to stop texting while doing homework. So, he wanted to find the level at which the reading material plus texting became too hard for the students. He determined that textbooks need to be written at a lower reading level to evolve with the new habits of today’s students.

Conger took fifth place for her project on “The Effect of Negative Campaigning in Young Voters.”

She used a recent senate race in North Carolina to remove any existing bias from her test subjects, who were high school students that would be able to vote in November.

She found that students who have a strong party preference were more affected by negative ads, whereas independents weren’t influenced at all. This was opposite of what studies normally show that swing voters are more influenced by negative ads. She thinks this is because young voters act more like swing voters and are not as set in their opinions. Her research did align with other studies that show negative ads decrease voter turnout.