High School Chemistry Students Uncover Well Water Contamination

Student Data Shows Unsafe Arsenic Levels in Maine Wells

An alarming 10% of Maine’s private wells are contaminated with arsenic, and many of the people who drink from those wells are unaware. It’s likely that around 38,000 Mainers unknowingly ingest private well water with arsenic above the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant levels. That’s because only 56% of wells in Maine have been tested for arsenic.

Students in Jon Ramgren’s high school chemistry class are helping change that. Since 2018, Ramgren’s classes have tested more than 350 wells in the vicinity of Waterville Senior High School in south-central Maine. 16% of the wells his students have tested contained unsafe levels of arsenic, a known poison and carcinogen.

The ME Department of Environmental Protection deems arsenic levels greater than 10ug/L unsafe.

Ramgren was one of the first teachers to join All About Arsenic+, a school-based citizen science initiative begun in 2015 by Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and Dartmouth College’s Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program. Students have tested thousands of wells in Maine and New Hampshire as part of this project, which is funded by a National Institutes of Health Science Education Partnership Award.

“We are getting real-world data that no one has; we are adding to data that is limited,” said Ramgren.

Spurred to Action

The well water testing results have spurred many students in Ramgren’s class to action. During the course of the project, some students discovered their water was tainted and have since installed arsenic-removing filters in their homes.

Others have been inspired to raise public awareness.

One student in Ramgren’s class, who was also enrolled at the local Mid-Maine Technical Center in the Mass Media Communications program, worked with a peer to produce a news segment about the project. After submitting the video to PBS Newshour Student Reporting Labs, the segment aired on public television, expanding the scope of their study to encompass an even broader segment of the community.

This level of engagement contrasts with what Ramgren sees in a traditional classroom.

“Most of the time in high school science,” Ramgren explained, “you are doing labs that are kind of meaningless in the sense of larger scientific data. No one is interested in the data some kid got about the density of copper.”

Nothing could be further from the truth with the All About Arsenic+ Project. The students’ efforts have captured the attention of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Maine lawmakers. In 2022, data collected by participants in the All About Arsenic+ program convinced the state legislature’s Committee on Labor and Housing to double their request for funding allocated to well water remediation.

“It’s real data that people are using to inform public policy,” said Ramgren. “You can gather real information as a citizen scientist and actually contribute even if you are ‘only’ a high school student.”

All sites on the map represent wells that hadn’t been tested for arsenic prior to the project. Data points in bright yellow show the locations where water samples were collected by Waterville students.

Building Data Literacy Along the Way

An equally important aspect of this project is helping students build data literacy skills. To do that, the data needed to be stored in a format that was user-friendly for everyone, regardless of their facility with spreadsheets.

“The public is at a disadvantage if they cannot play with data but scientists can,” explained Jane Disney, the project’s principal investigator.

All About Arsenic+ identified Tuva as the right partner for the job. Through the All About Arsenic + project data portal on Tuva, students and the general public can access all of the project data. Once there, Tuva’s tools make it simple to explore and make sense of the data. Users can drag and drop attributes to the graph axes, switch between seven different graph types, and filter the data.

Pie graphs and dot plots are two of seven graph types users can display with a few clicks of a button.

By collecting and analyzing real-world data, students get a more accurate picture of how professional scientists experience data — with lots of variability, background noise, and messiness. Because creating graphs by hand is so time-consuming, students are often only asked to make graphs when there is a correlation between variables. As a result, students may erroneously expect there will always be a correlation.

But it’s important for students to realize graphs showing a lack of correlation are equally important. The All About Arsenic+ dataset that’s housed by Tuva includes 28 attributes, or variables. Students can use the Tuva tools to quickly make and explore multiple graphs- both those that show correlation, and those that don’t.

With an r value of .008, arsenic and lead show no correlation. Ramgren believes exposing students to graphs that do not show correlation is an important part of data literacy.

Citizen Science: Worth the Extra Time

Engaging in citizen science is more time-consuming than using canned labs and textbooks, but Ramgren said the extra time is worth it. Amongst the benefits lauded by Ramgren are stickier learning, authentic problem-solving as students wrestle with how to act upon the data, a stronger understanding of the nature of science, and student empowerment.

Ramgren is hopeful that real-world data collection will help students avoid another misconception that plagues our society- the notion that science ideas are absolute and unchanging.

“Science is not static. We are constantly getting new information,” Ramgren said.

He thinks altering the way we teach science can help kids recognize science knowledge is subject to revision and improvement in the light of new evidence. When we have students redo experiments for which the answer is already known, we reinforce the impression that we know everything in science already. However, if students are actively adding to scientific knowledge, they will understand its fluid nature.

Explore the Data

The image below shows a static view of the project data from the 2022–23 school year. If you’d like to explore the data and manipulate it to make your own displays, click on this link: https://tuva.la/40BZNaj.

Notice that the white dots mark wells with safe levels of arsenic. All others have unsafe levels.

MDI Biological Laboratory. “All About Arsenic+.” All About Arsenic, 2023, https://www.allaboutarsenic.org/sepa/. Accessed 31 October 2023.

Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention & Maine Department of Health and Human Services. “Private Well Water | Maine Tracking Network.” Maine Tracking Network, 2021, https://data.mainepublichealth.gov/tracking/private-wells. Accessed 31 October 2023.

Viles, Chance. “Westbrook students’ science project makes impact in Augusta.” The Portland Press Herald, 1 March 2022, https://www.pressherald.com/2022/03/01/westbrook-students-science-project-makes-impact-in-augusta/. Accessed 31 October 2023.