CLIMATE LITERACY AND ENERGY AWARENESS NETWORK (CLEAN): A RIGOROUS PEER-REVIEW PROCESS FOR BUILDING A NEW COLLECTION OF HIGH-QUALITY DIGITAL TEACHING MATERIALS ON CLIMATE AND ENERGY SCIENCE
While a peer-review process is desirable for curriculum developer as well as collection builder to ensure quality, its implementation is non-trivial. We have designed a rigorous and transparent peer-review process for the CLEAN collection. Our experiences provide general guidelines that can be used to judge the quality of digital teaching materials across disciplines.
Our multi-stage review process ensures that only resources with teaching goals relevant to developing climate literacy and energy awareness are considered. Each relevant resource is reviewed twice to assess the i) scientific accuracy, ii) pedagogic effectiveness, and iii) usability/technical quality. A science review by an expert ensures the scientific quality and accuracy. Resources that pass all review steps are forwarded to a review panel of educators and scientists who make a final decision regarding inclusion of the materials in the CLEAN collection. Results from the first panel review show that about 20% (~100) of the resources that were initially considered passed final review. Reviewer comments are recorded as teaching tips to enhance existing teaching resources and help educators with the implementation in their curriculum.
CLEAN will launch the first collection of digital educational resources about climate science and energy awareness in October 2010. The final CLEAN collection will include ≥500 resources and will also provide the alignment with the Benchmarks for Science Literacy and the Excellence in Environmental Education Guidelines for Learning through interactive strandmaps.