ORONO – “I’ve got one alive and two dead. Do they normally lie on their backs like that?” asked a high school girl in a University of Maine Upward Bound class, How do I Know They’re Really Dead?

She peered into a screen box containing a potato plant and began 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 UM 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 UM professors, graduate students and even undergraduates who have passed through Upward Bound classes themselves.

Once accepted into the federally funded, three-to-four-year program, the students 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 poverty.

The program succeeds because learning is driven by a framework that starts with hands-on science experiments and progresses to other disciplines, including data entry, spreadsheets, math and statistics and report-writing, said Kevin Richards, a UM psychology major from Dover-Foxcroft who was an Upward Bound student.

The experience makes college less intimidating and less mystifying later, he said.

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,” said 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. That way I know they really get it.”

Nate Larlee, the acting Upward Bound math-science coordinator, said that once students understand how scientific experimentation is done, they are enthusiastic about charting new academic waters.

“We tell them we don’t have all the answers but we’ll help you find them,” he said. Faculty, staff and students explore together, he said.

Upward Bound at UM has two programs, the specific math-science program for New England students and a larger group of about 100 high school students from Maine only, comprising the more general, “classic” program.